By Jona Oberski
Pushkin Press, £10
A very small child remembers events in a series of snapshots. His parents are at the forefront of his world and he sees the outside world only as they present it to him; to an extent he can be protected from it. "We've gone away for a few days with a lot of other people," the mother staunchly explains to her tiny son, in the first splinter-like chapter of this beautiful, autobiographical novel, "but we'll be going home soon and daddy will be there."
Jona Oberski was born in Amsterdam in 1938; like the parents of Anne Frank, his family had moved to Holland assuming it would be safe for Jews. When Jona was a very little boy, his family made the grim journey to Bergen-Belsen; he uses his brief, vivid flashes of memory to describe the world as it appeared to a clever, petted, curious child. The reader is left to infer (and to admire) the heroism of his mother and father, struggling to shield him from the worst of it - what they don't know, they make up, and the little boy thinks they're heading for Palestine.
In the camp, the boy's resourceful mother manages to arrange a secret meeting with her emaciated husband. "I asked him if I could sit on his shoulders as I used to," says the boy, "But he couldn't lift me." The child can't understand why his mother insists on bundling him out of the room; he screams, until his father says, "Let him stay. We don't really have to." The author's description of his mother's determination to get her conjugal rights would be very funny if it wasn't heartrending. In similar vein, the newly liberated camp inmates have a potato-fight that is tragically hilarious.
These memories are static and dreamlike - as if the child has shut out everything else - but the short, stark, unsentimental chapters in A Childhood build to a picture that is amazingly vivid, like images left hanging after a nightmare.
Oberski's parents died, and the final snapshot is of the damaged child in his new life, followed by his laconic dedication to his foster parents, "who had quite a time with me". Unforgettable.
