A Childhood
“You are not a baby any more” is a phrase applied more than once to this small boy in the course of his telling of a story. It begins in Amsterdam near the start of WW2, when life as he knew it as the happy only child of loving parents ends when the family is transported to Bergen-Belsen. His disorientation, his bewilderment, his increasing anxieties and distressing misinterpretations of events carry him like a piece of flotsam on a flood through what follows. His account ends when, with both parents dead, he is returned to Amsterdam and put into the hands of foster parents, beginning the long journey to whatever recovery will mean.
By speaking to us in the words and through the thought processes of a confused and scared little boy while he struggles to make sense of a comprehensible world, this book cleverly makes a singular and powerful statement. Jona Oberski remains faithful to this treatment of his story, recalling exactly the sort of almost irrelevant and even trivial images and events that are captured and held in the memory of a small child. There is no mawkish sentimentality here. Nor is this boy unrealistically resilient. He is simply being drawn through what we perceive as a harrowing nightmare and only very narrowly surviving it. A Childhood punches well above its weight, and everyone should read it.
