Morris Gleitzman

Once opens with a Jewish boy escaping an orphanage in occupied Poland in 1942, convinced his parents are still alive and that the soldiers are burning books rather than people.

Gleitzman writes the Holocaust for children through Felix's misunderstandings, which is what makes it bearable and what makes it land. The series follows him to old age across six books.

He was born in England, moved to Australia at sixteen, and wrote comedy for television before children's fiction. The earlier books, Two Weeks with the Queen among them, are funny about equally hard subjects.