Then

Morris Gleitzman's Then is a Holocaust story for 11 year olds, told by a boy who has just jumped off a train.

What happens

Felix is ten. Zelda is six. They're running up a hillside in Poland in 1942 and they aren't running fast, because Zelda is in bedtime slippers, the grass is prickly and her legs hurt.

Three of them jumped. Their friend Chaya didn't survive it. Felix and Zelda buried her under ferns and wild flowers before they started climbing, and that used up most of what they had left.

Felix gives you this in one enormous sentence that opens with "You know how when" and finishes with a burial. He does that a lot. He hands you something unbearable the way you'd hand somebody a sandwich.

Another train comes. They lie flat on their tummies and don't move. There's a machine gun on the roof of the last carriage, but the two soldiers behind it are eating, so nobody looks down.

Felix prays to Richmal Crompton. Not God. Richmal Crompton, because she's a really good story-writer and in her books the headstrong cheeky children always come out of it fine.

Zelda is the other reason to read this. She's frightened and furious and she says exactly what she thinks. The hill is an idiot. Tripping over is the rabbits' fault. When Felix says something obvious she tells him he doesn't know anything.

When she does finally cry, he invents a house in the next valley with a kind cook who has made far too much dinner. Zelda puts in sausages. He adds boiled eggs. She wants marmalade on bread fingers. By the top of the hill they've got mangoes and oranges as well and she's pulling him up by the hand. She has never eaten a banana and doesn't know what one is.

There's no getting round what this book is. Chaya's death is on the first page. Both children have lost their parents. They hear machine guns going in the distance, and Felix works out precisely what that means and decides not to say it out loud, because there's only so much of that a little kid can take.

It isn't gory. It's worse in a quieter way, because the voice stays cheerful and hopeful and you can see everything he's carefully not looking at. A child who has done the Second World War at school and wants something real will get it here. A child who takes their worries to bed is better off waiting a year or two.

What to read next

Read Once first. It has Felix in a Catholic orphanage in the mountains, deciding that a whole carrot in his dinner bowl means his mum and dad are coming to fetch him.