A Childhood From Hell : A HOLE IN THE WORLD: An American Boyhood <i> By Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster: $19.95; 224 pp.; 0-671-69066-3) </i>

“A Hole in the World” must be read through tears--the reader’s and the writer’s--and it must be acknowledged as powerful a bearing of witness, as dark a story of cruelty, as redemptive a proclamation of the soul’s strength as we have been given in a very long time. Nothing by the prolific and talented Richard Rhodes--who has written first-rate fiction and nonfiction for years, and whose “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” was awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize--prepares us for this shattering testimony.

The subtitle becomes an indictment of an America where such terrible moments (and hours and days and years) can befall boys: Richard and Stanley Rhodes were terrorized by the woman their father married some years after his first wife, the boys’ mother, committed suicide in Kansas City, Kan., in 1938.

Richard was in his crib, 13 months old, when Stanley found their mother’s body and observed the damage inflicted by the 12-gauge shotgun that Georgia Collier Rhodes had put in her mouth before firing. Rhodes’ memoir is an effort to fill the hole blown into his world by the shot his mother triggered. The wound grew vast when, nine years later, his father married Anne, the boys’ stepmother. She tortured them for more than two years, until the courts removed them to the Andrew Drumm Institute, a private home for boys.

Using interviews with his older brother (and letters from him), reports of social workers, diaries, newspaper articles and the recollections of relatives, Rhodes assembles the story. He assembles the boys themselves and re-creates their torment.

His father was a boilermaker’s helper who worked in a roundhouse in Kansas City. Here is Rhodes’ description of the building:

“We entered a darkness of brick and soot-blackened windows, a cavern of hammers and forges, a huge smithy. Steam locomotives long and looming as ocean liners could be clocked around on track sections within its vastness and repaired. The forges glowed like campfires. The hammer faces rang like bells and threw firefalls of iron sparks. Sulfur and iron gritted the air, cinders of coal smoke scratched my eyes. . . .”

This Dickensian vision evokes not only trains but also a small creature in a huge world. As we read of the motherless boys drifting with their father to different boardinghouses over the years, and of the frightened child in strange rooms--”I began to be afraid that he was never coming back,” Richard thought about his father--we remember that Dickens’ genius lay not in inventing the terrors of childhood but in reminding us that we suffered them.

Rhodes did, and long before his wicked stepmother appeared. Sensitive, always fretful, he sees a ragman out of Dickens: “Two dark, bony horses with wild manes pulled his wagon on iron tires. He was dark and bony like his horses. His eyes burned, sweeping across the lawns. The wagon was piled with rags and broken furniture and dirty mattresses, buckets hanging off. . . . Up the hill . . . he came . . . I hid behind the elm. What if he stole me?”

Richard and Stanley weren’t stolen by Anne; they were handed over by their father. Think of “Hansel and Gretel”: The stepmother convinces the father that, since there isn’t enough food, the children should be abandoned in the forest to die; she and her husband will thus have the household’s provender. After small objection, the father sighs, “Ah, but I shall regret the poor children.”

That is all Richard’s father did. And therefore when, in 1949, a social worker investigated the children’s plight, it was recorded that Stanley, at 13 and standing 5-foot-4, weighed 97 pounds; Richard, at 12 and 4-foot-11, weighed 80 pounds. “For two years, to discipline us, to punish us and to maximize her profits from our labor”--she sent them out selling goods door-to-door, or working all day for small wages, which she kept--”our stepmother not only beat us, but systematically starved us. Dad let it happen, protesting when he dared but too intimidated to protect us.”

Teachers felt forced to supply them with milk after seeing their single-sandwich lunches--”She demanded we confine the tablespoonful of jelly to the center of the bread”--and at home the children were given either black-eyed peas or hard-boiled eggs: “She allowed a pot of eggs she was cooking to boil dry and burn (from careless reheating, the peas were routinely burned); we ate the burned eggs, burned protein like burned hair, or went hungry. We went hungry anyway, while she and Dad dined on pork chops and even steak.”

None of Rhodes’ assertions is merely the angry accusation of a damaged man; everything he tells us is grounded in the observations of others. The children were starved, hit with broom handles, mops, the high heels of shoes; they were slapped; they were lashed with a belt buckle; they were dressed in rags that weren’t cleaned or repaired; they were not bathed or shampooed. The stepmother worked not only from without: Assaulting them from within, she forced them to drink cod-liver oil by beating the child who resisted. She forbade Richard to urinate at night while she slept. The child, of course, lay awake, feeling his need, fearing reprisal.

Rhodes describes a snapshot taken at that time: “Stanley’s obviously emaciated. I look like an Auschwitz child.” The long section about “My stepmother, my commandant” is called “ Arbeit Macht Frei “ (work makes you free), the taunting slogan displayed over the gates of Auschwitz. Rhodes refers to “the concentration camp of our stepmother”; she is “like Klaus Barbie,” the Nazi murderer. The boys were the prisoners of someone whose madness, and the complaisance of whose husband, recapitulated the shattering truths of the Holocaust: that evil may prevail; that innocence is not protected; that punishment need not be deserved; that we may be crushed because someone stronger wills it.

Richard was drawn to books that “populated my desolation.” He was drawn to science and science fiction--to facts on which he might rely, and to escape from the life to which he was condemned. So powerful was his drive to buy pulp science fiction with stolen quarters that, “shaking with hunger but with only a quarter to spend, I wept tears of frustration at having to choose between buying food and buying a pulp. Even hungry I more often chose the pulp.”

The boy was fascinated by a Life magazine photo of an atomic-bomb explosion. He became the man who, later in his life, “dreamed of mushroom clouds boiling up from Kansas City, dreamed of fleeing the doomed city eastward, of looking back over my shoulder horrified but somehow also relieved, still a survivor.” He wanted his revenge.

The boy who was starved enjoyed working, in the Drumm Institute, at the slaughtering and butchering of livestock. One day, watching the guts being burned, he saw the tubing of a steer’s innards “expanding like an alien life form, like a nuclear fireball. . . .” He wanted his escape and his revenge.

So this was the man who wrote of hunger and cannibalism in his novel, “The Ungodly.” This was the man so honored for “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” This was the man who, first trying to write--language was to be his escape, the statement of his anger--was “afraid . . . that releasing the rage I’d restrained across the years would be more than the world could bear”: He was in his 30s, was 5-foot-10, weighed 132 pounds and was nauseated by food. Psychotherapy, and the drive to bear witness to his horrors, set him free to write his rage.

Rhodes survived two broken marriages, and so did his children. He survived alcoholism, depression and his childhood cruelties “to tell my orphan’s story, as all orphans do; to introduce you to my child.” He acknowledges that his child, his sad and vulnerable self, found light as well as darkness through the broken-hearted generosities of salesgirls who sneaked him food, of women in boardinghouses who held and cared for him, of public-school teachers and Drumm Institute men, of the women and men who made it possible for him to attend Yale, with books to study and clothes on his back.

And of course there was Stanley, a gallant big brother, who watched over Richard as well as he could. Rhodes writes the book “For Stanley and Richard,” the two little children whose history he plumbs in order to find out who he is.

That he can love them and make language for them, that he can create the child on our behalf, and his, and Stanley’s, and thereby re-create the man Richard Rhodes, is a major redemption.

It is a triumph over the worst in us by whatever in us is any good at all.

BOOKMARK: For an excerpt from “A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood,” see the Opinion section, Page 4.