File:1993 Faenza film.jpg

1st Dutch ed. (1978)

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

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

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

Abstract

"Jonah is a three-year-old Dutch boy who lives in Amsterdam during the Second World War. After the occupation of the city by the Germans, he was deported to the concentration camp together with his entire family in 1942. Here Jonah will spend the remainder of the war in a shack with his mother, but separated from his father. The child suffers cold, hunger, fear, deprivation, and even harassment by the other boys. He seldom encounters compassion: only the cook, who later dies, and the doctor of the clinic show him kindness. The fate of Jonah's parents is tragic: his father dies of exhaustion from being overworked and his mother succumbs in a hospital after the end of the war, having been driven insane by her ordeal and her husband's death. However, Jonah survives and, back to Amsterdam, is adopted in his father's employer home where, after an initial period of suffering, he regains the will to live. Many years after the war Jonah has become a nuclear physicist, gets married, and has three sons."