Once (14 page)

Barney squeezes my arm.

“Well done, Felix,” he says.

Lots of other people hold their hands out for toilet paper and I rip pages out for them as well. Now I’ve only got pages left with stories on them. Stories I wrote about Mum and Dad.

I look over at the people crouching in the corner, at the relief on their faces.

Mum and Dad would understand.

I rip the rest of the pages out of my notebook and wriggle past everyone to the toilet corner. I grab a metal bolt poking out of a plank in the wall. If I push the bolt through the pages, they’ll hang there and people can tear off a page or two as they need them.

The bolt comes away in my hands.

The wooden plank is rotten.

I kick at it and part of my foot goes through.

“Barney,” I yell.

People are looking at what I’ve done. A couple of men pull my foot out of the plank and start kicking at the wood themselves. Their big boots make a much bigger hole.

Barney and the men pull at the side of the hole with their hands and more bolts fly out of the wood and suddenly the whole plank comes away.

I can see green countryside speeding past.

One of the men tries to squeeze through.

“Wait,” says Barney. “We need to make the hole bigger. If you roll out you’ll fall on the track. You need to be able to jump clear.”

Everyone squashes back to give Barney and the men more room. Barney jams the plank into the hole and the men push till their faces are bulging.

A second plank splinters and the men kick it out.

They do the same with a third.

“That’s enough,” yells one of the men. He takes a couple of steps back and dives out through the hole. The second man follows him.

“Come on,” yells someone else. “We’re free.”

More people fling themselves through the hole.

I grab Barney.

“Won’t the Nazis stop the train and catch them?” I say.

Barney shakes his head. “They won’t let anything interfere with their timetable,” he says. “They don’t need to.”

We all freeze, startled, as gunshots echo through the train.

Lots of gunshots.

“They’ve got machine guns on the roof,” says Barney, hugging the little kids to him. “Easier for them than stopping the train.”

People are peering out of the hole, trying to see what happened to the ones who jumped.

“Look,” screams a woman. “Some of them have made it. They’re running into the woods. They’re free.”

I grab Barney again.

“We’ve got to risk it,” I say.

I can see Barney doesn’t agree. I can see why. Henryk and Janek are in tears. Ruth and Jacob are clinging to each other, terrified. Moshe has stopped chewing his wood.

I crouch down and in as calm a voice as I can, I tell them a story. It’s a story about some kids who jump off a train and land in a soft meadow and a farmer comes and takes them home and they live happily on the farm with his family and get very good at growing vegetables and in the year 1972 they invent a carrot that cures all illnesses.

I pull Zelda’s carrot out of my pocket to show them it’s possible.

But I can see that most of them aren’t convinced.

“Felix,” says Barney, “if you want to risk it, I won’t stop you. But I have to stay with the ones who don’t want to.”

“No,” I say, pleading. “We all have to jump.”

“I don’t want to,” says Ruth, clinging to Barney.

“I don’t want to,” says Jacob.

“I don’t want to,” says Henryk.

“I don’t want to,” says Janek.

It’s no good. I know I’m not going to change their minds. You can’t force people to believe a story. And I can see Barney isn’t going to try. Some people would make kids risk machine gun bullets and broken necks when they don’t want to, but not Barney.

“I want to,” says a voice, and a warm hand squeezes mine.

It’s Zelda.

“Are you sure?” says Barney, feeling her forehead.

“Yes,” says Zelda.

“You’re sick,” says Ruth.

“I’m better,” says Zelda.

Barney looks like he’s not sure.

“She wants to risk it, Barney,” I say.

“See?” says Zelda. “Felix knows.”

Chaya hands little Janek to Barney.

“I want to risk it too,” she says.

Barney looks at her for a moment.

“All right,” he says quietly. “Anyone else?”

The rest of the kids shake their heads.

I check that Mum and Dad’s letters are safely inside my shirt. And my toothbrush. Then I hug Ruth and Jacob and Henryk and Janek and Moshe.

And Barney. Now I’ve got my arms round him, I don’t ever want to let go.

But I have to.

“If you see my mum and dad,” I say, “will you tell them I love them and that I know they did their very best?”

“Yes,” says Barney.

His eyes are as wet as mine.

“Thank you,” I say.

I touch his beard for a moment and behind us I can hear some of the other people in the boxcar crying.

Barney hugs Zelda and Chaya. They hug the other kids.

“Only two wishes this time,” I say to the ones who are staying. “But at least we got to choose.”

Moshe, chewing again, smiles sadly.

I take hold of Zelda with one hand and Chaya with the other, and we jump.

  I lay in a field somewhere in Poland, not sure if I was alive or dead.

You know how when you jump off a moving train and Nazis shoot at you with machine guns and you see sharp tree stumps coming at you and then you hit the ground so hard you feel like you’ve smashed your head open and bullets have gone through your chest and you don’t survive even though you prayed to God, Jesus, Mary, the Pope, and Richmal Crompton?

That’s what’s happened to poor Chaya.

She’s lying next to me on the grass, bleeding and not breathing.

I reach out and touch her face. When I feel a bit better I’ll move her away from the railway line to somewhere more peaceful. Under that tree over there with the wildflowers near it.

Zelda is lying next to me too. We cling to each other and watch the train speed away into the distance.

“Are you all right?” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “Are you?”

I nod. My glasses are all right too.

“We’re lucky,” she says sadly.

“Yes,” I say. “We are.”

I think about Barney and what was in his jacket pocket when I hugged him just now.

Metal syringes.

I know he won’t let the others suffer any pain. He’s a good dentist. He’ll tell them a story about a long peaceful sleep, and it’ll be a true story.

I don’t know what the rest of my story will be.

It could end in a few minutes, or tomorrow, or next year, or I could be the world’s most famous author in the year 1983, living in a cake shop with a dog called Jumble and my best friend, Zelda.

However my story turns out, I’ll never forget how lucky I am.

Barney said everybody deserves to have something good in their life at least once.

I have.

More than once.

 

Dear Reader,

 

This story came from my imagination, but it was inspired by real events.

 

From 1939 to 1945 the world was at war, and the leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler, tried to destroy the Jewish people in Europe. His followers, the Nazis, and those who supported them, murdered six million Jews, including one and a half million children. They also killed a lot of other people, many of whom offered shelter to the Jews. We call this time of killing the Holocaust.

 

My grandfather was a Jew from Krakow in Poland. He left there long before that time, but his extended family didn’t and most of them perished.

 

Ten years ago I read a book about Janusz Korczak, a Polish Jewish doctor and children’s author who devoted his life to caring for young people. Over many years he helped run an orphanage for two hundred Jewish children. In 1942, when the Nazis murdered these orphans, Janusz Korczak was offered his freedom but chose to die with the children rather than abandon them.

 

Janusz Korczak became my hero. His story sowed a seed in my imagination.

 

On the way to writing this story I read many other stories— diaries, letters, notes, and memories of people who were young at the time of the Holocaust. Many of them died, but some of their stories survived, and you can find out where to read them by visiting my Web site or having a look at the
Once
readers’ notes on the Henry Holt site.

 

This story is my imagination trying to grasp the unimaginable.

 

Their stories are the real stories.

 

www.morrisgleitzman.com