After

“I think about a story mom read me when I was little. About a field mouse who was going to be killed by a dragon. Instead of cowering in the dry leaves, the mouse decided to look death in the face.

I bet mom and dad did that when the Nazis murdered them in the death camp.

It’s what I decided to do if the Nazis murder me. Keep my eyes wide open and look death in the face like mom and dad did.”

Felix’s monologue about imminent death reveals the mindset that Jewish Europeans held in the latter stages of World War II, when they fully understood that the Nazis meant to exterminate everyone of Jewish heritage. Unable to fight back, with roots of escape seemingly cut off, they were very much like the field mouse that Felix’s mother describes. Such fables were a source of power to people who were in extremely powerless positions. Over the course of Gleitzman’s series, so many innocent people in Felix’s life are arrested or killed by the Nazis that he understands that he might meet the same fate at any moment.

“I’ve thought of a way to save Gabriek and I need to do it before it’s too late.

[…] All my other ideas involve unarmed combat and avalanches and forest fires. I’m not very good at those things because you don’t get much chance to practice them in a hole.

So I’m going to use something I am good at.

A story.”

Despite the surreal circumstances of his life, like any other 13-year-old, Felix Salinger dwells in a world where imagination and fantasies blend with reality. This passage also reveals his valor, as he follows a band of armed men whom he assumes to be Polish secret police in league with the Nazis. While no rational adult would believe the absurd story that he concocts in his effort to save Gabriek Borowski, Felix grasps that he has no other way to save the life of the one who has concealed him for two years.