Emil Tischbein was twelve years old when he traveled alone to Berlin to visit his grandmother for the first time.
He carried a hundred and twenty marks carefully pinned inside his jacket — his mother's hard-earned savings for his grandmother.
On the train he fell asleep and when he woke up a man named Grundeis was gone and so was all the money.
Emil felt the particular shame of someone who has let down people who trusted him with something genuinely important.
He could have accepted the loss and hoped his family would forgive him — that would have been the easier choice.
Instead he followed Grundeis off the train and into the unfamiliar streets of Berlin with no plan and no allies yet.
The decision to pursue rather than accept the loss was the choice that set everything else in the story into motion.
Emil decided to catch the thief.

Erich Kästner's Emil and the Detectives opens with an act of decisive and characteristically childlike moral clarity.
Emil has been robbed, he is alone in a city he does not know, and he has no obvious means of recovering what he has lost.
An adult in his position would likely have concluded that the loss was irreversible and notified the appropriate authorities.
Emil instead begins to follow the thief through the city — an act that is simultaneously impractical and completely logical.
It is impractical because Emil has no real plan and no resources and no knowledge of Berlin's streets or their dangers.
It is logical because Emil has not yet learned to perform the adult calculation that weighs effort against probability of success.
He knows that the money has been stolen and he knows who stole it and he decides, very simply, to get it back himself.
This decision, made without calculation or hesitation, is what Kästner presents as the specific moral advantage of being twelve.
Emil decided to catch the thief.