The Wise Victims

HEROD'S CHILDREN by Ilse Aichinger. 238 pages. Athenaeum. $4.50.

The human mind has been haunted for 2,000 years by the Massacre of the Innocents, in which men killed children for reasons of state beyond the comprehension of their age group. Adolf Hitler is today's Herod, according to Viennese novelist Use Aichinger, and she has undertaken the tremendous responsibility of explaining what children thought about it all. In a thoroughly unbearable novel called Herod's Children, she invokes both recent history and Biblical Judea to belabor the reader's conscience with things that most people prefer to forget.

A group of children move between dreams, Passion plays, and a sort of endless hiding game in which the state is "It." There are imaginary angels, Roman soldiery, Marthas and Marys galore and child tramps who may or may not be held to represent the Three Kings of the East.

Unhappily Frau Aichinger, who was in her 20s when the sealed trains were rolling toward the death camps, has chosen to invest her innocent victims with an awful kind of knowledge of what they are in for. But the tragedy of innocence is that it does not know. When invested with the wisdom-after-the-event which properly belongs to the adult survivor, the children are less than the truth --they destroy pity because they are so self-consciously aware that they are pitiable. Anyone who ever wanted to tear the epaulets off Shirley Temple's Little Colonel will find himself unsympathetic to the doomed child who says: "I can't let my mother go alone, Mister Consul. Whom would she slap when she can't bear it any longer?"

Such a book cannot be dismissed by a shrug of criticism. But perhaps the best thing to do would be to remember the real children and forget the book's theological homunculi in their barbed-wire playpen.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.