Jona Oberski

Tres años en la vida de un niño judío plasman de forma concisa e intensa lo que significó para tantos seres humanos la ascensión del nazismo: el racismo, la marginación social, el enajenamiento, la pérdida de los derechos básicos y la de los seres queridos en los campos de exterminio. Infancia recoge el estremecedor relato de un niño que, con sencillez y aparente inocencia, nos cuenta la vida cotidiana de una familia perseguida por el régimen nazi.

Tres años en la vida de un niño judío plasman de forma concisa e intensa lo que significó para tantos seres la ascensión al poder del nazismo, la aparición de los primeros signos del racismo, la marginacion social, el enajenamiento y, finalment, la perdida de los derechos basicos y de los seres queridos en los campos de concentracion y de exterminio.

A small boy grows up in Amsterdam, making sand pies, playing with his favourite jumping jack toy, visiting his fathers 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.

A rediscovered masterpiece: an unblinking view of the Holocaust through a childs 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 Wiesels Night, and Primo Levis 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.