Childhood

Lydia Burton was an editor and writer living in Toronto, and was co-author of Editing Canadian English.

Oberski, born in Amsterdam in 1938, is now an academician at the university there. His childhood memoir of survival in a concentration camp (Bergen-Belsen) has a dreamlike quality that results from its success in expressing the perceptions of a very young child and of the disconnectedness of those perceptions. The reader must interpret, make connections, and establish a time frame for the narrative. The names of Oberski’s mother and father, and indeed his own name, are never mentioned in the story. Only a few critical place names are given — and no dates at all — so that some readers might come only very slowly to the implications of the material.

The story is written from the view of a child, perhaps three on four years old at the beginning, seven or eight at the end. Loving parents are represented by vignettes: the kinds of small episodes that constitute, for many of us, the only childhood we can remember. These episodes are discreet, “factual,” and without psychological or intellectual interpretation. The dialogue of childhood memory is not subtle: sentences are short and uncomplicated. Words are important, but meaning often is not — at least from the child’s perspective — because a child does not have the intellectual or emotional equipment to analyse it. Unpleasant events are forgotten (and therefore not carefully described, so the reader must infer) and are sometimes attributed to mother “dreaming” them.

The story reveals a happy child with caring parents; an anti-Semitic incident initiated by an older child; the round-up of Dutch Jews and their transportation to a camp; life in the camp and death of the father there; insensitive mistreatment by other, older children also interned in the camp — reflecting lack of understanding by the children of what was really happening to them; and then — miraculously — freedom.

The tour de force of this narrative is that Oberski does not misstep in maintaining the child’s view — the simple and uncomplicated perspective and the literal interpretation of what he is told and sees. His mother’s death, after liberation, reverberates sadly as the destruction of a kind, strong woman. But the meaning of that event, like others, is not fully apprehended by the child. The aunt, who protected Oberski as freedom came, arranges for friends of the family to act as foster parents. The difficulty and ultimately the success of their task can be surmised from this moving tale by a Holocaust survivor.