Over the past few months I've been promising some more background information about my new book Once. With Once on the shelves from 1 August, now seems like a good time. And the best introduction I can think of is the Author's Note from the book.

Dear Reader

This story came from my imagination, but it was inspired by real events.

From 1939 until 1945 the world was at war, and the leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler, tried to destroy the Jewish people in Europe. His followers, the Nazis, and those who supported them, murdered six million Jews including one and a half million children. They also killed a lot of other people, many of whom offered shelter to the Jews. We call this time of killing the Holocaust.

My grandfather was a Jew from Krakow in Poland. He left there long before that time, but his extended family didn't and most of them perished.

Ten years ago I read a book about Janusz Korczak, a Polish Jewish doctor and children's author who devoted his life to caring for young people. Over many years he helped run an orphanage for two hundred Jewish children. In 1942, when the Nazis murdered these orphans, Janusz Korczak was offered his freedom but chose to die with the children rather than abandon them.

Janusz Korczak became my hero. His story sowed a seed in my imagination.

On the way to writing this story I read many other stories – diaries, letters, notes and memories of people who were young at the time of the Holocaust. Many of them died, but some of their stories survived, and you can find out where to read them by visiting my website or having a look at the Once readers' notes on the Puffin site.

This story is my imagination trying to grasp the unimaginable.

Their stories are the real stories.

And here are some of those real stories, or rather the books that contain them.

The King Of Children by Betty Jean Lifton

Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries Of The Holocaust, edited by Alexander Zapruder

The Hidden Children by Jane Marks

Words To Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts From The Warsaw Ghetto, edited by Michal Grynberg

Witness: Voices From The Holocaust, edited by Joshua M Greene & Shiva Kumar

A Childhood by Jona Oberski

Maus by Art Spiegelman

The Diary Of A Young Girl by Anne Frank

Born Guilty by Peter Sichrovsky

The Hidden Children by Howard Greenfeld

Children Of The Ghetto by Sheva Glas-Wiener

Konin: A Quest by Theo Richmond

The Boys by Martin Gilbert

Flares Of Memory: Stories Of Childhood During The Holocaust, edited by Anita Brostoff with Sheila Chamovitz

Yiddishland by Gerard Silvain & Henri Minczeles

Children With A Star by Deborah Dwork

Ghetto Diary by Janusz Korczak

There are of course many other real stories of the Holocaust in many other books. And if you have a Jewish or Holocaust museum near you, you'll find a wealth of memories in their archives that are perhaps not published elsewhere.

Writing Once, and the reading I did in preparation for it, has changed my life. The time I spent with Felix and Zelda and the other characters in the story was very special to me. Like me they love stories, and the stories they tell help them stay loving and sometimes optimistic in terrible circumstances. I do hope you get to meet them some time.

Until next time, oo-roo and memorable reading.

27 July 2005