I Am David by Anne Holm

First published:David, 1963 (English translation, 1965; also as North to Freedom)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Themes: War, death, travel, family, religion, and poverty

Time of work: The mid-twentieth century

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: The Balkans, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Denmark

Principal Characters:

• David, the protagonist, who has spent all of his young life in a concentration camp
• Johannes, David’s sole mentor in the camp
• Carlo, the eldest boy of an Italian family, who tries to befriend David without success
• Maria, Carlo’s sister, whom David saves in a fire

The Story

David has spent all of his life in a concentration camp somewhere in the Balkans. He is suddenly given the opportunity to escape by one of the guards whom he particularly hates. Although naturally mistrustful, he takes his chance. The only instructions he is given are to head for Salonika, take a ship to Italy, and then make his way to Denmark. He is given a compass and a little food.

David has always been told what to do and how to do it, so he finds it difficult to make his own decisions. His body has been so conditioned that it often seems to take over, acting out of fear and the instinct for concealment. Gradually he discovers more and more inner resources. Fortunately, he has learned a number of languages in the camp, for representatives of many nationalities were being held there. He finds that he can survive in Italy and Switzerland as he makes his way northward.

He decides that his cover story should be that his parents are in a traveling circus and he is going to rejoin them. His greatest fear is to be recaptured by “them”—the totalitarian powers who have run the camp—and so he prefers to avoid people by traveling at night when possible. He needs food but is reluctant to beg, or even accept money for working. Yet there is a growing sense of providential help. When he loses his compass, which he has seen as his protection and guarantee of liberty, he finds himself forced to pray and to choose a god to help him. The man who had acted as guardian to David in the camp, Johannes, had told him about the David in the Old Testament. David decides to ask the God of this David to be his god. This decision comes as a natural extension to David’s having felt Johannes’ voice internally guiding him over the first part of the journey.

The two main adventures that befall David are being befriended by an Italian family, whose daughter David rescues from a fire, and being imprisoned in a barn during winter by a Swiss farmer who sees him as a source of cheap labor. The Italian experience brings about several emotional crises. David finds it difficult to trust and relate closely to other children, and he does not know how to play. He does, however, learn how to get to Denmark. The Swiss experience is not so threatening: It is not as bad as the camp, and it does protect him from the worst of the winter. When he escapes, the farmer’s dog escapes with him. The dog eventually sacrifices itself for David, being killed by border guards in distracting them while David crosses into Denmark.

During his travels David has also met a Danish woman who tells him of a friend of hers, taken prisoner with her husband and her son David. The friend escaped, and David becomes convinced that she must be his mother. He finally locates her in Copenhagen, and the book closes with their reunion, for he is right. It was for her sake that the prison guard had given David his chance to escape in the first place.

Context

The immediate context of the book is the Cold War situation of the mid-twentieth century and the most extreme form of totalitarianism in concentration camps. The “them” of David are never defined, but must denote the whole gulag system of Communism, since David will not accept as true any book written after 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution. Yet the book only indirectly makes political statements, and in this it is akin to Ian Seraillier’s The Silver Sword (1956), being more concerned to trace the emotional and moral lives of children brought up in such a context. Even so, Holm chooses quite a different approach from Seraillier’s: Her David is a much more damaged character than any of Seraillier’s children, yet as resourceful as and much more moral than his Jan.

This places the book in its wider context, as part of the ongoing debate as to the natural innocence or corruption of children. Holm lines up with the Romantic tradi tion of innocence. Even the bitter experience of the camp has failed to distort David’s innate morality. He even refuses to take a tip for helping a tourist, and he abhors any thought of stealing. His fear and lack of trust are being overcome as he draws on inner resources. The worst that the adult world has been able to do is to crush his spirit, but not break it or corrupt it.

Anne Holm’s success is that she is able to demonstrate this innocence in a more concrete and detailed way than had any work previously attempted in this particular context. Given the horrors of man’s inhumanity to man in the present age, I Am David is a powerful but realistic statement of hope.