A Childhood by Jona Oberski
Dutch autobiography
Original title – Kinderjaren.
Translator – Ralph Manheim
Source – Library book
I have over the last few years always try and put a book up for Holocaust Day . I had found this in the Library I do have a couple more on my shelves but there is always a feeling over time that there are fewer books about the Holocaust being talked about. I have Primo Levi on my shelves but he isn’t spoken as much as he once was. Anyway, this is a memoir about a Dutch boy. Jona Oberski was that Dutch boy who grew up with a new family after he lost his parents through the Holocaust. Anyway, he grew up to be a Nuclear Physicist. But in the mid-70s he attends a poetry writing class with the Dutch poet Judith Herzberg where he started to recount the events he saw as a child when he lost his family in the Holocaust.
“Aren’t you going to unwrap your presents?”
I looked at my father. The colours of the things on the table were reflected in his eyes. I gave him a kiss on the nose. That made him laugh.
“Don’t you want to see your presents?” He wanted to put me on the floor, but I was so comfortable just as I was. I had one arm round his neck and I held him tight.
“All this is for you.” My mother smiled at me and pointed at the table and kissed me. She picked up a red package, began to open it, and asked me to help her. While she held the package, I tried to get the paper off with one hand. It tore.
There is a real tension underneath this piece of his birthday, I was reminded of the last birthday in Anne Franks’s diary.
We see the events of the Holocaust through a very young boy’s eyes. How it affected the young Jona in a series of snapshots. The power of this book is how he captured the voice of the child. Those few memories we all have have captured her the events before the view of the family life in Amsterdam as a Jewish Family as the world around them is heading towards madness. He has a birthday but the way he describes it and the sense his parents know this is the last proper birthday they may all have together. When he hears his parents crying. Then when they finally head to the camps he and his mother are split from his father. But she is a resourceful woman and manages to find a way for the three of them to end up together for what would be the last time. He is in Bergen Belsen seeing the horrors but a chance event meant he luckily was able to live and write his own story.
My father was gone a long time. Somebody closed one of the wagon doors. My mother got up and stumbled to the door. She leaned out and yelled my father’s name. She yelled that the door had to be left open. She pointed and sang out: “There he comes.” She pulled my father in and other people helped. They all fell in a heap. They shut the other door. It was dark. I asked if they were coming over to me. My mother said:
“We’ll come as soon as we get used to the darkness.” Light came in through the cracks. Somebody tugged at the sliding doors but he couldn’t get them open. My mother sat back down on the bundle.
One of the last times he saw his father when the got to the Camp.
I missed bits f this book as it is a short book touching with a tine that has that child-like view of the world I am a fan of when writers get that childlike view of the world right and this is the case here a young boy seeing the horrors unfold but not knowing why. The parents cry but he isn’t quite sure why. It’s about the way they get treated as their world is changing. His father’s world changing. Then on the camps and how he is just with his Mother, she shields him as best she can. That last time they are all together. This is a short book but powerful There is a quote from Alan Sillitoe called this the book of the century. I wouldn’t go so far but I am always in the belief that Holocaust literature should be read in schools. Also, it is worth going to Beth Shalom The national Holocaust Museum and centre which is near Newark I have a couple of times. A place of remembrance. Have you a book from a Holocaust survivor you Like? I won’t score this book, I never do this type of book the are just so important and need to be promoted and read. Our candle
I read this book too, Stu, it’s very powerful.
At the end of my review I wrote
“The child finds it incomprehensible because he is a child. He narrates as a child who has no knowledge of the Holocaust, only what is happening to him and his secure world … and there are elements of this naïve ignorance which we realise that adults around him would have shared. Until the full horror of the Holocaust was known after the war, even adults caught up in it did not understand the evil scope and intention of it; they only knew what was happening to them. But although we as adult readers in a post-Holocaust world understand what is going on in this story, when we reflect on the Holocaust at this distance in time we still find it incomprehensible, as incomprehensible as the child does, though in an entirely different way.”