Jona Oberski

Gevoelens en ervaringen van een joodse kleuter die met zijn ouders enkele jaren in een concentratiekamp doorbrengt tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog.

Kinderjaren

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. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Childhood

A small boy grows up in Amsterdam, making sand pies, playing with his favourite jumping jack toy, visiting his father's office as a treat. He is loved. Then men with guns come in the night to take them away, and the familiar world of his childhood is destroyed. In this searing, spare novel Jona Oberski, who was transported to Bergen-Belsen as a young boy, recreates the state of childhood with unblinking, almost unbearable clarity. Conveying the joy of family life and the terror of separation, these vivid, haunting snapshots of memory have the darkness and strangeness of the most terrible fairy tale, as a child tries to understand the horror unfolding around him. Jona Oberski was born in 1938 in Amsterdam. He studied and worked there as a nuclear and particle research physicist, and still lives there with his wife Froukje Slijper. He is the father of three sons, two from an earlier marriage.

Jona Oberski

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