Dalager David's Story

1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-906582-23-4
Verlag: Aurora Metro Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

A classic of children's literature, translated into several languages.
Separated from his parents who are deported by the Nazis, David struggles to survive, alone, hungry and scared, until he eventually finds his way to the city of Warsaw. There he learns from other Jewish boys how to work in the black market, dodging the police and the Gestapo until the terrible day comes when the Warsaw ghetto is cleared and everyone is herded onto trains for the long trip to the camps. Will David survive? Can he outwit them one more time?
Shortlisted for The Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation.
 Reviews:
'How was it possible for Stig Dalager to write about the last years of the story of David in such a shocking and convincing way that one should think that this was written by Isaac B. Singer or one of the other Polish-Jewish geniuses?'  -Jewish Information Magazine
'Dalager has written a shockingly relevant historical novel, a taut story of international standing and appeal. A monument to our own shame, at that time and now.'  -Politiken Newspaper, Denmark
'Despite being a translation of Stig Dalager's original Danish text, this is one of the most readable and accessible accounts of the Holocaust I have ever read. My wife and I both enjoyed this book immensely, and it reads well. It is presented in good clear prose, and rings true with other accounts - my wife once transcribed texts from Holocaust survivors, and knows what sounds like real accounts. Dalager is an experienced writer, and this shows.
There are a number of Holocaust survivor children's diaries, and you can feel that whilst this book is changing from one to another, each section was very real to the person who wrote the diaries used. The story begins with the start of restrictions on Jewish life, and advances to roundups, forced marches, the ghetto, and transportation. The ending is something you'll have to judge for yourself as to whether or not David makes it out alive. He certainly seems to be able to escape from earlier challenges, but the author has adapted the stories, so who knows which chapters were real happy endings, and which ended the way that so many tragedies did in those times.
The atmosphere in David's village at the start shows the tipping point where Jews were suddenly no longer just neighbours, and became non-persons to be abused and ultimately murdered. The question one has to ask is: just how did their oppressors come to believe that anybody has the right to do what they did? In reality, this book reminds you that in the end, it was the Nazis who lost their humanity. Humans could not have treated children the way that these children were forced to suffer.
Read this book, and if you didn't understand what I meant in the previous paragraph, you soon will... ' *****- M. J. Jacobs, Amazon
 
About the Author
Stig Dalager is one of Denmark's most distinguished authors whose novels and plays have been translated and staged internationally. His works include I count the hours, (staged in 12 countries), The Dream, (premiered in New York's La Mama Theatre starring Ingmar Bergman and Bibi Andersson ); Two Days in July (a novel about the plot to kill Hitler), Journey in Blue, about Hans Christian Andersen (published in 15 countries and nominated for The Impac Prize 2008), The Labyrinth and Falling Shadows (about 9/11).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dalager, Stig

Weitere Mitwirkende

Osterfelt, Frances

Robson, Cheryl

Leseproben

Half an hour later, he’s beyond the village striding along the winding road to Kielce in his tightly laced boots. As he passes one small farm after another, fields and trees and hills seem to melt together. He hasn’t seen a soul on the road so far and wonders where all the people have gone. In spite of the bitter wind, he’s built up a sweat. When his legs begin to ache, he takes a break by the side of the road, and sits there, scratching the ground with a stick, until the roar of engines somewhere in the distance, forces him to jump up and hide behind a tree. A moment later, a convoy of motorcycles, trucks and armoured cars rumbles past him, leaving snatches of words and laughter hanging in the air. He stays safe behind the tree until they pass and then steps out onto the road. At a bend further down the road, the last truck unexpectedly pulls in beside a clump of pines and stops. Quickly, he hides behind a tree, closing his eyes and pressing his cheek up against the trunk. His heart’s racing, his hands are sweaty, but nothing happens. In the descending mist he can only hear remote, incoherent sounds from the distant truck. Finally, he sticks his head out and looks up the road: a man with boots and a grey cap has gotten out and opened the back of the truck while three others with steel helmets jump down and drag something out from the darkness. He can’t see what it is – it looks like bundles of clothes or sacks of potatoes. The man with the grey cap points to a spot in the brush and the three soldiers throw the bundles away. One of them lights a cigarette, they stand a while and talk, but he can’t make out what they’re saying. The man with the grey cap brushes something from his shoulder then casts a quick glance up and down the road. David presses himself right up against the tree and digs his nails into the bark. With his eyes shut tightly he waits until he hears the truck start up and drive away. Silence surrounds him, like a strange dream. Suddenly, he’s startled by the sound of something rustling in the undergrowth. When he turns around he notices a squirrel watching him, calmly, before it darts off among the trees. Not knowing what he’s doing or why, he walks up the road towards the pines. Immediately, he can see the bundles lying where they were thrown amongst the bushes. Two canvas bags tied at the top with thick cord. They have a strange shape. He bends down and tries to lift one of them, but can’t, it’s too heavy. He happens to notice his boots, one of them is covered in a strange liquid, he bends down again and feels it with a finger - it’s red, looks like something he’s seen before. It looks like blood. It’s only now that he notices that the bottom of one of the sacks is covered in blood. Frightened, he jumps back, looks around anxiously, but there’s still no one around. He grabs a handful of grass and desperately tries to clean his boots, but no matter how much he rubs, there’s still a trace of blood. What should he do? He looks back and forth from the sacks to his boots. But as his panic mounts, he remembers what his father told him… that sometimes… sometimes, farmers dispose of sick or dying animals, and he thinks: ‘It’s not people, it’s pigs.’ And then: ‘The Germans must have stolen some pigs and discovered they were sick, so they threw them away. Yes, that’s all it is. Now he’ll just look in one of the sacks and then go on to Kielce and tell his uncle all about it.’ Somewhat relieved, he unties the cord on one of the sacks, opens it and looks in. He hasn’t seen it, he won’t see it, and yet he stands there staring at it, his hands frozen to the edge of the sack. Three long fingers stick up from inside the dark sack, a glazed eye and an open mouth twisted to the side in a deathly pale face, its cheek pressed against a shoulder, blue veins protruding from the thick neck, the body slumped in a heap… With a start, as if he’d been stung, he drops the sack; it falls back into the brush with a faint dry sound. He stares at the two sacks for a moment, then walks out onto the road and continues to Kielce as fast as his legs can carry him. He sees nothing, just walks. A little way down the road he stops suddenly, grips his stomach, runs over to a field and vomits. Once again he takes some grass, wipes his mouth and sets out onto the road on his way to Kielce. Gradually, as he’s walking along, thoughts return to him, and the image of the body floats before his eyes. Something in him is about to burst, a wave of feelings rush through him, he’s been hit by something greater than himself. He struggles to believe that it wasn’t really a corpse. He won’t believe it, and under no circumstances will he tell anyone about it, not his uncle, not his father, not his mother. He won’t frighten them, no, why should he? They’re frightened enough as it is. And anyway, his uncle would only say that it’s something he’s made up. “He has a lively imagination,” he’d say. And then he’d say: “May God protect you, David, lest that imagination of yours gets you into trouble one day.” * In the great dark house in Kielce, his cousin Anna opens the door, but she isn’t smiling like she usually does, she just nods, quickly lets him in and immediately locks the door again. “Why are you locking the door?” he asks, but instead of answering she says: “We’re all in the dining room. Come in and have some borscht.” She puts her hand on his shoulder and leads him through the house to the dining room, where everyone – his uncle, his aunt and his cousins – is seated around the table eating. They turn silently towards him as he comes in, his uncle gestures to him to sit down on the high-backed chair next to him. The menorah is lit and the curtains are closed, he doesn’t understand why, but he says nothing. His cousin serves him some borscht from a tureen; he starts eating immediately, but he can’t help thinking of the man in the sack and puts the spoon down again. A haze descends, he feels dizzy, but clings on to the chair tightly. It soon passes. “You must eat something,” says his uncle, looking anxiously at him. “Why aren’t you eating?” He doesn’t know what to say, so he just says: “I have a stomach ache, I can’t eat anything.” “How old are you?” asks his uncle. “Eleven,” says his aunt before he can answer. “You must eat something,” says his uncle, not looking at him any more. “We all have to eat, we’ll need all the strength we can get.” “He doesn’t know what you’re talking about!” says Isak, his cousin who’s eighteen years old and soon moving to Warsaw to go to university. “That’s no way to talk to your father,” says his aunt, glancing at Isak, who throws up his arms. “I think we ought to tell David what’s happened, and if you don’t - I will.” They all look silently at his uncle, nobody is eating. Anna gives him a small, sad smile and shakes her head slightly then stares down at her half-empty bowl. His uncle takes a white napkin and slowly dries his grey-bearded mouth. He places the napkin on the table and continues to stroke his beard. His uncle’s hands are long and graceful, the hands of a physician. Once, when he had a high fever and thought he would die, his father brought him to his uncle’s house, where he laid in bed for weeks while his uncle gave him medicine and cold compresses. While he stayed there and slowly recovered, his uncle used to come to his room and watch over him, even though he was always busy. His uncle had many patients, wealthy folk in furs, as well as patients who had almost nothing, who could only give him bread or even nothing at all. One evening his uncle told him all about the Garden of Eden, while sitting on a chair in front of the window in his dark suit. His voice wasn’t stern as it sometimes could be. Every now and then he’d be afraid of his uncle because he expected so much, but that evening his voice was soft and low, perhaps he was dreaming, perhaps he was really talking to himself. He told David about the lion and the lamb that grazed together, about the grass that was so green that it hurt one’s eyes to look at it, about eucalyptus trees whose leaves glistened in the sun, and about music, strange music that could be heard everywhere like a murmuring on the breeze, and the rush of the clear springs more refreshing than anything else you could imagine. “But why did Man leave the garden?” his uncle asked rhetorically and breathed deeply. “Is it because Man is evil?” he asked in the darkness before answering again: “No, Man isn’t evil, he’s impatient. He’s too impatient to bear happiness.” Now in the dining room, his uncle said: “You must tell your father what’s happened: they’re starting to throw Jews out of their homes, they call it ‘Resettlement’. It’s happening right here, some people have already been put in the gymnasium, others have been moved, mostly to small flats, where people are packed together. It could be our turn next. We don’t know what to believe. Rumours are rife. Some think they’ll set aside a special area, others say that we’ll have to leave town, but no one knows. They could knock on our door tomorrow… you see?” David nods, his cousin Anna looks at him again, she seems even sadder than before. He, too, is sad. It’s as if they’re all waiting for something, a sign, a movement, or maybe a visitor to suddenly walk into the room and say that it’s all a bad dream and that it’s time to wake up. But nobody comes. The oak cabinets, the paintings, the doors all remain still. His...