Once I read a story about a 10 year old Jewish boy named Felix who lived in Poland in 1942 and I felt a terrible sadness as I read it. Once is very poignantly narrated by Felix. He tells the reader that he had been placed in a catholic orphanage by his parents, booksellers in Poland, and has lived there for three years. The novel is about a young Jewish boy growing up in the 1930s in a catholic orphanage in German mountains. This boy has two secrets: one is that his parents are both alive, and two is that he’s Jewish (which the other children don’t know). His parents told him when they left him that they were going to find more books, as they owned a bookshop, and they promised him that one day they would send him a message when they would
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There is no sense of purpose of living for anyone when there is no one to live for but for this young boy, Felix, he has a sense of purpose, a goal to live for, see his parents again. He was told by his parents that they would return for him and little did he know of the horrifying things that took place during that time, his parents were probably never returning. To get through his daily lives at the orphanage, he keeps himself occupied with his made up stories that he tells himself to keep him going through these tough times. In order to cope, Felix wraps himself in stories to keep the facts from tearing his life apart. For three years and eight months he's been waiting for his parents to come back and collect him. One night at dinner, when a nun serves him a bowl of watery soup that includes an entire carrot, Felix is overjoyed, convinced it's no accident but rather a sign that his parents are finally on their way to pick him up. We all have our ways to cope through tough times and the times that every Jew must be going through this time is excruciating. While he clings to his fantasy to make his life bearable, we readers are not so lucky. As we all know our history that nothing during that time was bearable, but the way this …show more content…
How his journey to find his mum and dad turns out to be his journey from innocence to realization about the situation of Jews under Nazis. In essence, Gleitzman has expressed what we already inherently understand; that in times of despair, even if we don't survive, sometimes our stories
There is no sense of purpose of living for anyone when there is no one to live for but for this young boy, Felix, he has a sense of purpose, a goal to live for, see his parents again. He was told by his parents that they would return for him and little did he know of the horrifying things that took place during that time, his parents were probably never returning. To get through his daily lives at the orphanage, he keeps himself occupied with his made up stories that he tells himself to keep him going through these tough times. In order to cope, Felix wraps himself in stories to keep the facts from tearing his life apart. For three years and eight months he's been waiting for his parents to come back and collect him. One night at dinner, when a nun serves him a bowl of watery soup that includes an entire carrot, Felix is overjoyed, convinced it's no accident but rather a sign that his parents are finally on their way to pick him up. We all have our ways to cope through tough times and the times that every Jew must be going through this time is excruciating. While he clings to his fantasy to make his life bearable, we readers are not so lucky. As we all know our history that nothing during that time was bearable, but the way this …show more content…
How his journey to find his mum and dad turns out to be his journey from innocence to realization about the situation of Jews under Nazis. In essence, Gleitzman has expressed what we already inherently understand; that in times of despair, even if we don't survive, sometimes our stories