70 pages • 2 hours read
Morris GleitzmanOnce
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 15-17 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary
The Nazis drag Felix, Barney, and the children from the cellar and march them through the ghetto. Barney says they are being taken to the railway station. Felix figures the soldiers did not shoot them in the cellar because they want to make an example of them, parading them for other hiding Jewish people to see.
Felix thinks of a way to save Zelda’s life: He tells her to put the locket back on. At the train station, Barney tries to keep the children’s’ spirits up. The train is not a passenger train. Down the line, Nazis brutally force people on to it. One woman is shot. Barney tells the children to make a tent with their coats and distributes a little water. He gives Zelda crushed aspirin mixed in the last of it. Felix quietly shows Barney Zelda’s locket. Barney sighs and tells him that Zelda’s parents must have been killed by the Polish resistance. He agrees that they should tell someone. On the platform, Felix sees the officer who was Barney’s dental patient.
With some difficulty, Felix attracts his attention. He gives the officer the story he wrote for him and shows him Zelda and the locket. Barney converses with him in German, and the officer “points to Zelda and Barney and then points to the railway gate” (65). Barney pleads for the other children, but the officer starts to get angry. Felix begs Barney to stop, to save himself. Felix and the others are grabbed and thrown on the train. Zelda struggles, crying out for Felix. Felix sees Barney crawling into the train after them. In the confusion, Felix yells a farewell to Zelda. However, she is thrown onto the pile of children on the train. She tells him, “I bit the Nazi […] Don’t you know anything?” (66). Felix thinks he hears gunshots, but then he realizes that the train cars are being nailed shut.
Chapter 16 Summary
The train car is overcrowded. Barney has the kids search each other for lice. Zelda is asleep. Felix apologizes each time he bumps into someone until a man yells at him to stop. People have begun relieving themselves in the corner. Felix feels sorry for the old people who are not used to going without toilet paper. He tears out a page from his notebook and gives it to an old woman to use. She weeps in gratitude and Barney praises Felix for helping. One by one, Felix rips the pages out of his notebook and goes to hang them by the bathroom corner—even the ones with stories written on them.
Felix removes a bolt to hang the pages on and the wood of the side of the car crumbles away; it is rotten. He kicks it, and his foot goes right through. Men in the car notice and kick the hole open wider. Under Barney’s direction, the remove three planks. Several men jump out of the moving train. Barney says the train will not stop. Roof-mounted machineguns fire at the men. Some of the men make it and run off into the woods. Felix tries to convince the other children they must jump, but they are too afraid. Zelda volunteers, and another girl, Chaya, follows. Barney will stay with the other children. They exchange an emotional farewell with Barney. Felix grabs Zelda and they jump off of the train.
Chapter 17 Summary
Chaya does not survive. Shot through the chest, she lies dead on the ground beside Felix and Zelda. Felix moves her body next to trees and wildflowers. He thinks of the metal syringes he felt in Barney’s pocket when he hugged him goodbye and knows “he won’t let the others suffer any pain” (69). Felix does not know how the story of his life will turn out. Barney told him that everyone deserves something good in their life, at least once, and he thinks, “I have. More than once” (69).
Chapters 15-17 Analysis
The final section of Once is marked by sacrifice, loss, and hope. Felix never fully understands Barney, and because of this, Gleitzman leaves the reader to speculate about his past. His reaction to seeing the dead toddler with Felix makes it likely that Barney lost children of his own; he, like Felix’s parents, may have done all he could to protect his children and failed. This would explain his motivation to save Felix, Zelda, Chaya, and the other children.
Like his inspiration, Janusz Korczak, Barney chooses to forego his relatively protected status in the ghetto and board the train to the death camp with the children he tried so hard to protect. The dental anesthetic Felix and Barney found in the abandoned dentist office makes a return. Felix understands that Barney will use it on the children who remain on the train to grant them a painless death, rather than exposing them to the horrors of the death camps. This would have horrified Felix early on, but by the time he and Barney part, Barney has helped Felix achieve a more mature understanding of their world.
When Felix brings Zelda’s locket to Barney’s attention, both decide to act with compassion toward Zelda, even though she is the daughter of a Polish Nazi. Felix values their connection to the extent that he now considers her a member of his family. Barney sees the locket as a means of securing Zelda’s safety: She is not Jewish and thus should be protected by the Nazis. Because her father was a Nazi, it is more likely that he was killed by the Polish Resistance than by other Nazis. The Resistance existed since the initial occupation of Poland by Germany and played a key role during the duration of the war, disrupting German supply lines and saving many Jews from the Holocaust. The gunfire Felix heard in the distance as he searched for his hometown was likely a skirmish between the Resistance and Nazi forces.
Zelda, who could have been taken to safety by the Nazis, resists and is thrown onto the train along with Felix and the others. She, too, recognizes Felix as a family member and refuses to leave him behind. By the time Felix and Zelda escape from the train, they are truly all they have left in the world. They have lost Barney, and even Chaya, who jumped with them. They take Chaya’s death in stride, pausing only long enough to bury her body in a peaceful spot. Felix has lost his stories, sacrificing his notebook to be used as toilet paper for the Jewish captives on the train. In this way, Felix’s storytelling again provides comfort. By the end of the novel, Felix recognizes that he did not have something good in his life only once; each connection he has made, from Dodie, to Barney, is something good that he will carry with him and incorporate into his life’s story.
