Title: ChildhoodAuthor: Jona Oberski
Publisher: Plume
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Jona Oberski has created the Holocaust through the eyes of a very small child, a child experiencing the baffling walls of discrimination that isolated his Dutch family during Nazi occupation and the walls of concrete and steel that rose in reality as his family was interned at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
The most interesting thing after reading Childhood, is the point of view. Never have I read a book told from a seven-year-old boy's point of view. It made the book very interesting, it is also one of the few things I'd applaud the author for. You don't know anything more than the boy does, and everything is described how I would picture a child, picturing it. How difficult it must be to imagine yourself as a Jewish seven-year-old, whilst I thought it's impossible to picture myself at such a young age.
As I rated the book only two stars, I found it okay. It was a quick read and no difficult linguistic usage. Even if you haven't read the synopsis or know anything about it at all, the pieces fell into place very quickly. I only needed the first few chapters to figure out the rest of the book. I may have been wrong at some times, although most of the events were very predictable. At other moments, the boy as a character felt flat and superficially written. We never get to see any highlighted emotions, what must be the case in a war. Because of the point of view, I didn't get to see much of the war as an important element of the book. One time I had to do some research to figure out a thing or two.
Childhood was a book I was required to read and would have never read it if I'd the chance. Yet the biggest difficulty I had with it, was figuring out wether I liked it or not. I'm choosing somewhere inbetween.
