Once Study Guide

Morris Gleitzman was born in Sleaford, Lincolnshire, England, in 1953. In 1969 he moved to Australia, where he subsequently studied writing at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (renamed the University of Canberra in 1990). After working as a television and film screenwriter, he adapted one of his screenplays into his first novel, a children’s book called The Other Facts of Life, published in 1987. His second novel, Two Weeks with the Queen (1990), became a bestseller and won a Family Award; two years later, Mary Morris adapted the novel into a play, which has since been performed internationally. Gleitzman has published more than 40 books, including Once (2005), Then (2008), Now (2010), After (2012), Soon (2015), Maybe (2018), and Always (2021), a series about a Jewish boy named Felix Salinger living through the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland and his life in the aftermath. The Once series has won many children’s-book accolades; for example, the original Once novel was named a Sydney Taylor Honor Award Winner, a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults Pick, and an USBBY Outstanding International Book. Morris Gleitzman himself was named the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2018–2019.

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, beginning World War II (1939—1945). From 1939—1941, the USSR helped Nazi Germany with the invasion and subsequent occupation of Poland. Then on June 22, 1941, the Nazis launched a surprise invasion of the USSR, their former allies. The Nazi offensive against the USSR led to a wholesale Nazi occupation of Poland, ending only with the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allies (an international military alliance led primarily by the U.S., the UK, the USSR, and China) on May 8, 1945. During World War II, the Nazis carried out the Holocaust, a genocide against Jewish people. During the Holocaust, the Nazis murdered about six million Jewish people through mass shootings, gas chambers, and deaths by starvation, disease, and overwork in ghettos and concentration camps. When the Nazis invaded Poland, about 3.5 million Jewish people were living in the country. From 1939 to 1941, the Nazis stripped Jewish people in Poland of their legal rights and possessions and forced them to live in specially designated urban ghettos. Because the Nazis did not allow nearly enough food into the ghettos, many Jewish people in ghettos died of starvation. Nazis also killed Jewish people in Poland by forcing them into mobile gas chambers known as “gas vans” and by rounding them up into large groups and shooting them. In 1942, Nazis began transporting Jewish people in Poland to concentration camps equipped with multiple gas chambers for large-scale murder. Several of the largest Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, were in Poland. Historians estimate that about three million Jewish people died in the Holocaust in Poland—approximately 50% of all Jewish Holocaust deaths.

Once by Morris Gleitzman represents the Holocaust through the naïve perspective of its child protagonist, Felix Salinger. Much tension in the book derives from dramatic irony, in which the reader—having greater historical knowledge than Felix—realizes that Felix is in mortal danger of which he is unaware. Gleitzman may have drawn inspiration from such classic novels such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), which represents the atrocity of U.S. slavery through the young, naïve perspective of its titular protagonist, and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (1897), which represents irresponsible and cruel adults from the perspective of a neglected young girl. It may also have drawn inspiration from Anne Frank’s The Diary of A Young Girl, a journal that a Jewish girl wrote from 1942 to 1944 while in hiding in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, before she was apprehended and died in a concentration camp in 1945; her journal was published in the original Dutch in 1947, in English translation in 1952, and in many other languages subsequently. Felix, the protagonist of Once, himself loves the English children’s book author Richmal Crompton (1890—1969), whose Just William series stars an English schoolboy who, like Felix, is adventurous and highly ethical. Gleitzman’s Once is one of several famous contemporary children’s books set during the Holocaust, including Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars (1989), Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2005), and John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2006).