After

From the initial uncertainty that launches the action of the narrative to the uncertainty of Felix’s fight to save prisoners’ lives in the closing chapters, the primary goals of every civilian caught in a war zone are to survive and to remain as unscathed as possible. Despite the relative youth and innocence of Gleitzman’s target audience, he nonetheless strives to fully describe and reveal the multitude of potential causes of death that civilians must face in a war in which they are not combatants.

Throughout the entire Once series and quite frequently in After, Felix Salinger has repeated close encounters with the possibility of dying. As a Jewish boy now accustomed to constant persecution, he knows that to be arrested by the Nazis or by the sympathizing Polish Secret Police will result in his immediate execution or relocation to a death camp. Yet this is not the only life-threatening situation that awaits him, for ironically, even potential allies like the Polish partisans can be deadly; they also threaten his life frequently, fearing he might reveal his knowledge of their location. Felix also exists under the shadow of many other threats as the novel progresses, for like other hidden Jewish children, Felix faces the possibility of instant death if those who shelter him die or become compromised, and he must also negotiate the more indifferent environmental dangers of frostbite, exposure, and hunger. Often alone in the elements, he almost freezes to death on one occasion. Later, when hidden in the swamp and responsible for six squabbling children, he knows that he and his group are susceptible to attack from those who might want his horse, food, or clothing.

While Felix is particularly at risk because of his Jewish heritage, Gleitzman points out that every civilian life is in danger during wartime, from the erstwhile actions of allies as well as from the outright hostility of enemies. When Felix and Yuli travel to a town to barter for food, they see Nazi soldiers arbitrarily burn a farm and kill the residents. The two arrive just as Allied bombers level the city, not only destroying the Nazi installations but killing scores of civilians, including a woman who was hiding three young Jewish sisters. Later in the novel, Felix repeatedly witnesses atrocities committed against civilians. Hiding in a ditch, he watches a Nazi soldier shoot a Jewish man, one of a great column of concentration camp prisoners, who stumbles, no longer able to march. When Russian soldiers, supposedly medical personnel, unaccountably stop at a Russian farmhouse, Felix follows them inside and observes them abuse and kill a German woman.

By crafting and conveying the violence of such scenes, Gleitzman makes it clear that the potential for death comes from all sides in the war, for in addition to direct conflict, the threat of annihilation also lurks in the indirect dangers of starvation, exposure, and disease. As partisan Dr. Zajak points out to Felix, antibiotics and adequate medical supplies are in short supply and are reserved for combatants. Civilian deaths because of the war, the author demonstrates, continue long after the shooting ends. Felix spends weeks at the camp where he finds his mother, just before she dies, tending to others who survive the concentration camps and the war but are too ill to recover. In this book about warfare, Gleitzman wants readers to grasp the difficulty of surviving faced by those who simply find themselves in the path of combatants.