Chamberet: Recollections from an Ordinary Childhood

by A . Wainhouse (Translator), Claude Morhange - Beque (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1990

  $8.67

  Writing about my childhood today, I have come to see that those were not ordinary times , writes Claude Morhange-Begue. But for me, as a child, they were; for I had not known any others . The ordinary times Morhange-Begue speaks of began when she was not quite eight years old; in April 1944, the SS paused in the French village of Chamberet for some routine business and left with Morhange-Begue's mother. For the rest of the war she was interned at Auschwitz. She returned at war's end, her health irreparably impaired but wanting to talk.Forty years passed, and that child became a woman and a mother in her turn. Chamberet was written, she says, in order that certain things not be forgotten. Unable not to speak when she came home, her mother, having spoken, had been unwilling to record those things for others in writing; the daughter therefore assumed that task and bore witness on her mother's behalf. What she presents is a stirring tale of personal emergence.