File:1978 Oberski.jpg

German ed. (1980)

French ed.(1982)

English ed. (1983)

Spanish ed. (1987)

Italian ed. (1993)

Film (1993)

Title

Jona Oberski. Kinderjaren ('s-Gravenhage: BZZTôH, 1978). <Dutch>

• Jona Oberski (M / Netherlands, 1938), Holocaust survivor

Translations

• German trans. Kinderjahre Wien [Austria]: Paul Zsolnay, 1980. Repr. 1999, 2016.

• French trans. Années d'enfance. Paris [France]: Mercure de France, 1982. Repr. Paris [France]: Gallimard, 1992.

• English trans. Childhood. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983 / repr. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2014.

• Spanish trans. Infancia. Barcelona : Ediciones B, 1987.

• Italian trans. Anni d'infanzia: un bambino nei lager . Firenze [Italy]: La Giuntina, 1993.

• Also published in Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Croatia, Norway, Poland, Sweden.

Adaptations

• Roberto Faenza. Jonah who lived in the whale / Look to the sky (Jona che visse nella balena; Italy, 1993). <film>

Abstract

"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."--Publisher description.