Once: Pages 41–52 Summary & Analysis

Walking almost nonstop for two nights and a day, Felix reaches his hometown. The buildings look as he remembers, but he thought the town contained more food shops. Now he wonders whether he invented them while he was hungry at the orphanage.

Felix also remembers his town bustling, but this town is empty. Looking around, confused, he sees his parents’ bookshop without “a single Nazi burn mark.” Dizzy with hunger, Felix wishes his parents were there, not elsewhere saving their business. Then he tells himself to toughen up, hide the books before the Nazis arrive, and find clues about his parents’ location.

Felix tries the bookshop door. It’s locked. He peers through a window and sees no books, only used clothes. Confused, he checks and finds his own initials on the front door where he put them before he left for the orphanage. Hearing voices from the apartment over the bookshop, Felix yells for his parents. Though the voices go quiet, no one responds. Felix infers that his parents no longer recognize his voice. He runs around the bookshop and through the apartment’s open back door. Inside, he finds a strange, angry woman who yells at him to leave.

A strange man appears from the bedroom and tells the woman to catch Felix so they can “hand him over.” Felix flees. On his way out, he runs into Wiktor Radzyn, a Catholic boy from his old school, who yells “Jew” and says the place belongs to his family now.

A crowd chases Felix, but he escapes and hides at the town’s outskirts. Watching people disperse, he wonders why they hate his family—“They couldn’t all have bought books they didn’t like”—and why the Radzyns are living in his family’s apartment. Abruptly, Felix decides the U.S. visas his parents applied for must have been approved. His parents must have sold the bookstore to finance a new one in the U.S. Felix recalls his father telling him once that in America, bookshelves are “solid gold.”

Felix reasons that if his parents have U.S. visas, they must have gone to the orphanage to get him. He decides to travel back there as fast as he can. Leaving his hiding place, he runs into a small boy and girl. The boy tells him they’re “playing grabbing Jews in the street.” The girl explains that she’s pretending to be Jewish; the boy, pretending to be a Nazi, will abduct her. She tells Felix to be a Nazi. When he refuses, the girl tells him to be a Jew and act sad because the Nazis took his parents. When Felix gawks, the girl says that her father told her that “all the Jew people got taken.” The boy tells the girl Felix “doesn’t want to play.” Internally, Felix agrees.

Felix sneaks back into town after dark and stakes out his Jewish neighbor Mr. Rosenfeld’s house. He wants to prove that the little girl is wrong—that the Nazis haven’t taken away all the Jewish people. When he doesn’t see Mr. Rosenfeld, he knocks on the door and calls out, saying it’s “Felix Salinger.” 

A man covers Felix’s mouth and snatches him into a nearby alley. The man, whose face Felix can’t see in the dark, tells him that Mr. Rosenfeld and Felix’s parents have been taken to the city: that’s why the “weasel Radzyns” are living in Felix’s house and selling clothes and possessions that Mr. Rosenfeld left behind.

The moon lights up the alley, and Felix recognizes the man as Mr. Kopek, who “used to empty toilets with Mr. Radzyn.” Mr. Kopek tells Felix to “go hide in the mountains” and asks him to deny that he talked to Felix if “they” catch him. Felix tells Mr. Kopek that the Nazis won’t pursue him: he doesn’t have books. Baffled, Mr. Kopek gives Felix a package and flees.

Inside the package are bread and bottled water. Felix wonders why some people help “Jewish book owners” while other people are so hateful. He invents a story about children whose parents die under an avalanche of Jewish books at a warehouse and who swear revenge, but it doesn’t seem plausible. He thinks maybe he’ll invent a better story on his way to the city to find his parents.