After

Though Felix goes next door with the intention of buying food from the resident, he cannot because the man lies in front of his house, killed by the bombing. When he steps into the man’s flat to see if food is still there, a voice calls out, “Stop in the name of Adolf Hitler, or we’ll shoot” (126). Felix does not find the voice frightening and realizes that it is a boy about his own age dressed as a Hitler Youth, pointing a rifle at him. The boy asks what he wants, and Felix asks to buy food. A second boy appears whom Felix recognizes as the one from whom he stole the bicycle and bazookas. A third child, a little girl with blonde hair, appears as well.

As he stares at all of the food in tins behind them, Felix learns that they do not have a can opener. Felix offers them a bargain: If he shows them how to open the cans of food, they will split the food with him. He takes diamond rings from the partisans’ sack of gems and teaches the boys how to use them to open cans of food. When he tells the boys he will be back to get his half, the boy with the rifle raises it and threatens to shoot him. Felix backs the boy down by saying that his mother will come in and kill him in five seconds. Felix takes many of the food cans next door and gives them to the Jewish girls, showing them how to open the cans with rings. When he goes back to the cart, he sees Yuli. She tells him that they must return immediately to the forest camp. She has learned that the Germans have found its location and are about to attack it.

Yuli urges Dom to go as quickly as he can along the trail toward the camp. They see tracks where German vehicles have driven along the trail toward the camp ahead of them. As they approach, they hear gunfire. Yuli grabs her gun and tells Felix to take the cart into the swamp and wait for her there. He refuses to go until she holds her gun under his chin and says it is an order.

Using his compass, Felix guides Dom through the undergrowth to the swamp and waits there through the night, long after the gunfire ends. In the morning, he realizes that it has been hours since the gun battle ended and Yuli still has not come for him. He resolves to return to the partisan camp and find her.

On the way back to the partisans’ camp, Felix tries to imagine that everything will be well when he arrives and that the partisans have defeated the Nazis. The instant he arrives at the camp, however, he sees the bodies of many dead partisans. He searches frantically for Yuli, calling for her and looking for her red head scarf, but he cannot find her anywhere. In the medical treatment room, he finds the body of Dr. Zajak. In total, he locates the bodies of 11 partisans and realizes that about half of the group has been slain.

He notices that the supply bunker has been set on fire intentionally and understands that the rest of the bodies were placed in the bunker before it was burned. He eventually sees a red scarf and believes that Yuli was one of those placed in the bunker. He finds the body of Pavel, the chief of the partisans, whom the Nazis left hanging on a tree. Felix deals with the enormous grief he feels by slowly digging graves and burying all the bodies. He says, “[I]t’s an honour [sic] for me to bury these brave partisans. Especially Dr. Zajak. It’s a way of saying thank you” (143). Having lost his mother and father, Gabriek, and Yuli, Felix decides that he will no longer try to acquire other people to stand in for his parents.

Now completely on his own and with nothing to keep him at the forest camp, Felix takes Dom and the cart and returns to the town to see if he can find some of the food tins. He stops along the way to buy potatoes and straw. Before he hunts for the tins, he goes to the three sisters’ flat and finds that it is now even more damaged. When he calls out for the girls, they do not answer at first. Then he hears them underneath the floor. He shows them one of the rings he used to open the tins and they emerge. Felix offers to take them to a special hiding place in the swamp. He wants to get more tins of food from next door, but they tell him that it has been hit by another bomb.

Felix discovers that the house next door is now a pile of rubble. He begins to dig for food tins and realizes that he is standing on top of a table. As he clears rubble from the table, he sees that beneath it there are the two Hitler Youth boys and the one little sister whom he bargained with earlier. Taking what food he can salvage, Felix guides Dom and the heavily laden cart to the swamp. As they ride, he hears the six orphans complaining and arguing with one another and says to himself, “You have to expect arguments when you’ve got Jews and Nazis in the same cart” (150).

At the beginning of their time on the island, there is friction between the two sets of orphans. Felix makes them all brush their teeth even though they only have one toothbrush. He boils the toothbrush between uses by the different groups and explains the importance of hygiene in helping them to remain healthy and hidden. When it is time to sleep, he encourages everyone to lie against one another to remain warm. The Jewish girls and the German boys do not want to touch but need each other’s warmth. As he listens to their bickering and wonders how he can keep the peace, Felix thinks, “How did this happen? Last week I decided to do without parents, and now I am one” (154). The Germans boys are Axel, Helmut, and the younger girl, Helmut’s sister, is Bug. The Jewish sisters are Hannah, Beryl, and Faiga.

After two weeks on the island, Felix’s group has eaten about half of their food. He wonders what they can do to acquire more food without endangering themselves, for he has no more jewels to sell. The children have stopped fussing about being Jews or Nazis and have reverted instead to traditional conflict between children, which Felix regards as progress. Now all the young people admit that they hate Hitler and acknowledge that the Nazis have ruined their lives. They also express a desire to disrupt Nazi plans and hasten the end of the war. Felix realizes that, if they can engineer another train wreck, they can pilfer supplies for themselves. He creates a plan to use Dom to cause a train wreck.

With Felix coaching them, the children carefully plan a way to remove a section of track and derail a train so they can steal food from it. For several days, they search for the right train tracks and count the number of times the trains go by each day. Putting the plan into action, all seven of them take the cart to the track, with the boys dressed as Hitler Youth and Felix wearing a Nazi uniform. They cover the cart and hide it so that, if the Nazis discover their plan, the little girls hiding in the cart will be spared.

As they make their final preparations, a huge explosion knocks them all down, and they see that the train trestle has been blown apart. As they watch, the children also see Nazis planting additional explosives on the remaining part of the bridge and blowing it up. At first, they cannot understand why the Nazis are blowing up their own train track. Then Felix remembers, “Sometimes retreating armies destroy their own stuff as well, but only when they know they’ve lost the war” (166). Felix explains this as they ride back toward the swamp. They wonder if the war is over and rejoice at the thought that their ordeal might be over soon. Felix begins to miss all the people he will never see again, even though the war is over. As they approach the swamp, he sees Yuli in the distance.