Word: tanguy
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After jumping over the wall in the narrowest of escapes, Tanguy and his odyssey of torment moved from darkness into light. He was enrolled in a Jesuit school for the children of Andalusian peasants...
...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...
Mistakes Will Happen. Tanguy was herded into a sealed cattle car with a group of Jewish children bound for a German concentration camp. For 3½ days, under a broiling August sun. the railroad car remained unopened while the children wept, sickened, and gradually lost control of their natural functions. Tanguy kept up his courage by believing that it was all a "mistake," and that once the authorities found out that he was not Jewish they would send him back to his mother. The word "mistake" recurs through Del Castillo's book and picks up the same rhetorical power...
What happened to Tanguy at the Nazi camp adds little to the all too familiar living-death literature. What gives it a special horror in this book is that it all happens to a little boy. Tanguy would surely have died but for a German friend named Gunther who mothered him, fired his flagging will to live, and, before his own death, left the boy a matchless maxim: "Leave hate to those who are too weak to love...
Orphanage by Dickens. Peace brought no peace to Tanguy. He went back to Spain, but found no trace of his mother. He was sent to an orphans' and delinquents' home that might have been imagined by Dickens. It was run by sadistically inclined lay brothers. Tanguy took his beatings without a whimper: he "had exhausted his capacity for crying, just as he had drained away his reservoir of hope...