Childhood
By: Jona Oberski ; translated by Ralph Manheim ; afterword by Jim Shepard
Contributors: Manheim, Ralph, 1907-1992, translator
Series: Penguin classics; Penguin classics
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2014
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 95
ISBN-13: 9780143107415
Subjects: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945); Bergen-Belsen (Concentration camp); Fiction
Work titles: Kinderjaren
Description: A rediscovered masterpiece: an unblinking view of the Holocaust through a child's eyes. Told from the perspective of a child slowly awakening to the atrocities surrounding him, Childhood is a searing story of the Holocaust that no reader will soon forget. As five-year-old Jona waits with his mother and father to emigrate from Nazi-occupied Amsterdam to Palestine, they are awakened at night, put on a train, and eventually interned in the camps at Bergen-Belsen. There, what at first seems to be a merely dreary existence soon reveals itself to be one of the worst horrors humanity has ever created. A triumph of heartrending clarity and dispassionate amazement, Childhood stands tall alongside such monuments of Holocaust literature as The Diary of Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel's Night, and Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz.
Notes: Translated from the German.