Childhood

Childhood

Jona Oberski

Language: English

Pages: 59

ISBN: B0047EINPY

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


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 interred 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.

Showcasing the Third Reich: The Nuremberg Rallies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some big children ahead of me were whispering. All of a sudden they stopped. I asked them what was wrong. They said that I shouldn’t look but a big palooka was coming our way. I looked and saw a soldier in a green uniform with a big brown dog. The dog look like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, but the kraut was holding him on a chain. The children said I mustn’t look, and they all stood with their backs to the road so I couldn’t see. A big girl asked me, “Have you got a tongue?” A few of the.

Bodies. They were gray. The dirty sheets looked white beside them. I went back and shut the wooden inside door. I went to the outside door. There was no handle to open it with. I banged, but it didn’t do any good. I heard the children outside. I went to the other door and opened it again. I went in and stepped over the first bodies. I climbed up on the pile and looked into the topmost bundled sheet. All I could see was an arm. I started to unwrap the sheet. I heard them yelling outside. I pulled.

Stood it on end. It fell over every time I let go. Suddenly my mother was standing beside me. She shoveled sand into the pail. “You see?” she said. “This is how it’s done.” I knew that already. I started shoveling. “I’m going back up again,” she said, and kissed me on my wet forehead. I gave her a kiss on her wet chin. With my shovel I beat the sand flat. The bricks stayed up. My mother had brought a mold too. I put sand in the mold and made a row of sand pies. • • •  The bricks fell over. I.

I could get up or if it was too early and why they were dressed. They said it was evening and not morning and that I had to stay in bed till I was better. I said I hadn’t been sick at all, I’d only had crazy dreams. Trude said the doctor was coming soon and I was really sick with a fever and I had to stay in bed. I asked how it could be evening when I’d gone to bed in the evening. Trude said, “Because you’ve been sick for five days and you’ve had a terrible fever.” I looked at Eva and said that.

Than he’s letting on: In the evening there was talk and people said nobody’d be going to Palestine. But somebody said, “Shh, there are children here.” I pretended their talking didn’t bother me. And after a while I really didn’t hear it anymore. That last sentence actually allows us to glimpse the mechanism of repression in operation. Knowledge is filtered in, and buried. A compromised innocence is restored. Knowing and not knowing, some power and total powerlessness, complicity and innocence:.

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