Austerlitz and the Erased Childhood

Imagine discovering at middle age that your entire childhood was a lie. W.G.

Sebald's Austerlitz follows Jacques, an architectural historian obsessed with grand European

buildings, who suddenly realizes he's been studying monuments to avoid confronting his

own erased past. Raised by a cold Welsh minister after arriving on the Kindertransport

in 1939, Jacques spent decades living under a borrowed identity. When fragments of

memory begin surfacing, he embarks on a haunting journey back to Prague, uncovering the truth

about his parents and the Holocaust that swallowed them. What makes this novel extraordinary

is how Sebald weaves uncaptioned photographs throughout, blurring fiction and documentary