Previous
Pages 99–111
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Once, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Storytelling
Innocence and Ignorance
Antisemitism vs. Human Dignity
Family
Morality, Violence, and Complicity
Summary
Analysis
In the cellar the next morning, Felix brushes his teeth furiously; he’s enraged at Barney, who wouldn’t let him ask the Nazi officer about his parents. Felix’s story involved the German soldiers transforming a windmill into a water pump to create an ice-rink for African children, which amused the Nazi officer so much he asked Felix to write the story down; he wanted to send it home to his children. Felix thought that maybe this Nazi officer would be willing to help his parents, but Barney yanked Felix away before he could ask, saying asking for help would be “too dangerous.”
The Nazi officer’s reaction to Felix’s story encouraged Felix, as it seemed to reveal the officer’s sense of humor and fondness for children. Felix doesn’t understand why Barney thinks asking the Nazi officer for help would be “dangerous.” In his relationships with Mother Minka and Dodie, Felix has shown that he can put his loved ones’ bad or violent actions in context and still believe them to be good people; yet in his belief that the Nazi officer might help him, Felix reveals that he has difficulty putting a person’s apparently friendly acts in context and realizing that a person who commits such acts can still be cruel, violent, and deeply complicit in systematic evil.
Themes
Zelda comes into the bathroom and asks whether Felix found their parents when he went out with Barney. Felix feels guilty about his impatience to find his parents when Zelda’s are dead: “I try to think up a story about how parents aren’t really that important, but I can’t because they are.”
When Zelda asks after her own parents, it reminds readers that Felix is still concealing their deaths from her, just as Felix’s parents and Mother Minka concealed important truths from him. Felix senses that his behavior toward Zelda is wrong because parents “really are that important”—emphasizing how much family matters to Felix and the other children.
Themes
Zelda says she knows how they can spot their parents, points to a crack near the ceiling, and says they can see into the street from there. Jacob confirms it—he’s piled up mattresses, stood on them, and peered out. Felix and Zelda try it. They only see feet, but Zelda exclaims that she sees her mother’s shoes. Felix sympathizes—he thought he recognized his father’s pants until he saw three other people wearing the same kind. Zelda bounces, and the mattresses topple, dumping Felix and Zelda to the floor. When he checks whether she’s all right, she’s looking for her slippers; she wants to put them on and go find her mother. Felix realizes that she “needs to know the truth.”
Zelda’s belief that her parents are alive puts her in danger—she plans to flee the safety of the cellar and enter the Nazi-occupied city to find them. It is only when Felix realizes that his kind lie has made Zelda more likely to act dangerously that he decides she “needs to know the truth.”
Themes
Barney asks Felix whether he’s certain that Zelda’s parents were dead. When Felix says he is, Barney says that Zelda does need to know and that Felix should be the one to tell her, since he witnessed it. When Felix says he doesn’t “know how,” Barney says to describe what happened without inventing. Felix wishes he could invent a happy story, but he knows he can’t.
When Felix says he doesn’t “know how” to tell Zelda that her parents are dead, he means that he doesn’t feel up to the responsibility of bearing terrible news. This reminds the reader both of how young Felix is and how much he has come to care about Zelda. Yet Felix does realize that a happy story is inappropriate to the occasion, which demonstrates that he is learning what stories are and are not good for.
Themes
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When Felix tells Zelda the truth, she refuses to believe him, falls onto a mattress, and sobs. Other children start crying. Ruth says that “goblins” beat her father to death with sticks. Jacob says he found his family burned when he came home from school. Henryk says that goblins “killed Sigi and cut his tail off.”
Though Zelda at first denies that Felix is telling the truth, the other children find Felix’s acknowledgment of horrible truths cathartic. It allows them to share their own traumatic experiences of Nazis killing their families and mutilating their pets (“Sigi” is presumably Henryk’s dog). Ruth calls the Nazis “goblins,” suggesting that some of the children can only talk about the evils they’ve experienced by using fairy-tale terminology.
Themes
Chaya tells a story about goblins who visited a princess’s castle seeking “information about their enemies.” They said the princess had to choose: they’d hurt the princess, “the old people,” or “the babies.” The princess chose for them to hurt her, but when she couldn’t tell the goblins anything, they hurt the old people and the babies too. Everyone is weeping, but Felix is crying because he feels “lucky,” since his parents aren’t dead yet.
Chaya extends Ruth’s use of “goblins” to describe Nazi soldiers to explain what happened to her own family. She says the goblins wanted “information about their enemies,” which indicates that Nazis tortured Chaya and her family for information about the Polish Resistance (military and civilian groups in occupied Poland that smuggled intelligence to Allied forces fighting the Nazis, sabotaged Nazi supply lines, engaged in guerilla fighting against Nazi soldiers, and so on). That Chaya explains symbolically what happened to her using fairy-tale terminology shows that stories can help people indirectly communicate truths that are too painful to convey directly. Given the horrible tragedies that the other children have experienced, readers may wonder whether Felix is in fact “lucky”—or whether bad things have happened to his parents without his knowledge.
Themes
