Once

Blurb

Once is a 2005 children's novel by Australian author Morris Gleitzman. It is about a Jewish boy named Felix, who lived in Poland, and is on a quest to find his book-keeper parents after he sees Nazis burning the books from a Catholic orphanage library in which he stays. He finds a girl called Zelda in a house with her dead parents - he takes her with him and protects her from confronting her parents' death by telling her stories. Although Once is a work of fiction, Gleitzman was inspired by the story of Janusz Korczak, the events of World War II, and Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. The sequel to the book is called Then.
Once was translated into German and was nominated for the 2010 Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis; it won the 2011 Katholischer Kinder- und Jugendbuchpreis .