Michel del Castillo, 91, Dies; Child’s-Eye Chronicler of Concentration Camps

Michel del Castillo, a Franco-Spanish writer whose wrenching chronicle of a childhood spent in World War II concentration camps brought him renown on both sides of the Atlantic, died on Dec. 17 in Sens, a town in northern Burgundy. 17. He was 91.

His death was widely reported in the French news media. No other details were immediately available.

Mr. del Castillo published dozens of novels, essays and works of autobiography in the four decades after his debut novel, “Tanguy,” appeared in 1957. (An English translation, “Child of Our Time,” was published in the U.S. and England the next year.) He went on to win several major French literary prizes.

But it was his first book, published when he was only 24, that made the most lasting impression. In 1958, reviewing it in The New York Times, the Holocaust scholar Richard Plant said it “begins where Anne Frank’s diary ended.” With its graphic account of privation, suffering and death in French and German concentration camps, Mr. Plant warned, it was “not meant for the squeamish.”

A lightly fictionalized story, it shocked reviewers and readers as a child’s-eye view of mid-20th-century Europe’s worst horrors — especially since the boy at the center of the story, Tanguy-del Castillo, had been abandoned by his feckless middle-class parents to face those horrors alone.