Books: Cry, Children, Cry

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CHILD OF OUR TIME (281 pp.)—Michel del Castillo—Knopf ($3.75).

The 20th century has supped so full of horrors that it has all but digested its conscience. The age prattles of guilt, yet rarely feels it. Man's inhumanity to man has become not so much a cause for tears as merely another Cause. To get beneath this thick-skinned indifference, a book need not be a masterpiece, but it must speak the language of the heart so guilelessly as to make sophistication a mockery and callousness a crime. Such a book, and a small masterpiece, is Michel del Castillo's Child of Our Time.

Like The Diary of Anne Frank, this story takes its unproclaimed text from the New Testament: "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones ... it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea." The offense against Author del Castillo (who calls himself Tanguy in this autobiographical novel) began with the Spanish Civil War. At the age of three he saw corpses in the streets of Madrid, an omen of the dread commonplaces that would haunt his boyhood. Though his mother was a militant left-wing journalist, the Communists shortly clapped her into jail. His father, a social-climbing Frenchman who detested his wife's politics, had left for France before the war. But when the Loyalists lost, mother and son threw themselves on his untender mercies. When they arrived in France, he met them in a crowd of other refugees. Ignoring the boy, the father took one look at his wife and snapped, "You turn up with all this riffraff­ Hate the World. Still, Tanguy was happy in the little house outside Vichy where they settled, and for a while he felt like "an ordinary boy again." But the parents quarreled, and his mother decided to move on. The police arrested the woman and child on vague political charges. "Who denounced us?" asked Tanguy. "Your father," was the reply. At that moment Tanguy hated the whole world, "his father and mother, the policemen ... all grownups, because they seemed to hate him, and he was only seven years old."

Tanguy and his mother spent 18 months in a concentration camp in South France before she arranged to escape via a kind of underground railway. "Please, please don't leave me behind, Mama," begged Tanguy, and as he watched her go, he felt that "an iron hand was squeezing him inside" and that he would die of misery. ("He had not yet learned that no one ever dies of misery.") The plan was for Tanguy to follow his mother a few days later, on his ninth birthday, but the Nazis closed the escape hatch.