Like Carl Friedman’s Nightfather and just about all of Marga Minco’s work, this short novel deals in muted tones with the trauma of the Second World War. Like the other books it is fiction rooted in direct personal experience — here the experience of a Jewish family in a concentration camp.


It is the unusual angle on the war that gives Childhood its power. The events are presented through the uncomprehending eyes of a boy who is not even eight when the war ends. The story starts several years earlier, as Nazi measures aimed at isolating Jews from the rest of the population in occupied Holland begin to take effect. One day the family of three — mother, father and child — are rounded up and taken to the assembly camp at Westerbork, in the eastern Netherlands (the scene of Jacques Presser’s Night of the Girondists), but it turns out to have been an administrative error. Shortly afterwards they are arrested again, and this time it’s for real. After some weeks at Westerbork they board the notorious goods train leaving once a week for an unnamed destination. The boy is told they are bound for Palestime, but they end up in Bergen-Belsen. Men and women are separated here, and the boy stays with his mother. When he next sees his father, he barely recognizes him. Then news reaches them that the father has died. One day — it must be towards the end of the war — the boy, his mother and their friend Trude are put on a train together with hundreds of other camp inmates. The train isn’t going anywhere and stands idle for days. The mother gets very sick. Soldiers in different uniforms appear, even though at first the boy doesn’t realize what this means. They are Russians, and the war is over. But despite hospital treatment the mother does not recover. The final scenes are of the boy returning to Amsterdam on a Canadian army truck, and starting a new life with a foster family.


Throughout this harrowing tale the reader knows more than the boy, and recognizes the full horror of the events which the boy is only dimly aware of at best. At times this creates a wry sense of humour, as when other children dare the little boy to thumb his nose at a German camp guard. But it is the book’s relentless downward spiral that stays with the reader. Even the moments of intimacy between mother and child at the beginning are overshadowed by ugly scenes of discrimination outside, and they are followed by deportation, separation, suffering and death. The boy registers all these things in short, simple sentences which refrain from stating emotions. True, he cries a lot, but at childlike things, not the tragedy affecting them all. That is what makes the book so hard-hitting: it intimates the larger tragedy by focussing on the boy’s innocent perception.

All of a sudden the door opened. My mother stood still. Somebody came in. He stopped by the door. I was pretty sure I knew him, but he was standing in the dark. I went over to my mother. She was standing by the table, looking at him. He looked at her. I saw she was scared. I grabbed hold of her coat. ‘Be still,’ he said. ‘Don’t say anything. I don’t want to know.’ I knew the voice too. He came over to us. They hugged each other. I stood behind her back. My mother cried.

Then she wiped her tears away. She said to me, ‘Don’t you know your daddy?’ He said to me, ‘I know I’ve changed, with my beard and my bald head. Do you still know me’? He took hold of me gently,. I knew it was my father by the feel of his hand. I let him pull me. He hugged me. But there was a lot of coat and hair between us. (p. 51, tr. Ralph Manheim)