Then

Then is a novel for young readers by the Australian writer Morris Gleitzman, published in 2008 and set in Poland during the Second World War.

Felix and his friend Zelda are ten years old, Jewish and on the run. They escape from a cattle car bound for the death camps in the early 1940s and have to survive on their own, which means finding food and shelter and a story to tell anybody who asks them who they are. A farmer called Genia takes them in, and her reasons for hating Germans are entirely her own; the children are never really safe, and they learn quickly how much rests on the goodwill of adults who may or may not decide to keep them.

Gleitzman tells the story in Felix's voice, so events arrive as a child might receive them, with hope and misunderstanding doing as much work as fear. It is one of a series of novels about Felix and Zelda, and it can be read on its own as the story of two children trying to remain people while everything around them is being taken away.