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.