BURNED CHILD SEEKS THE FIRE.<i> By Cordelia Edvardson</i> .<i> Translated from the German by Joel Agee</i> .<i> Beacon: 106 pp., $18</i>

This mesmerizing archeology of a harrowing childhood is certainly a Holocaust memoir, for the author’s survival of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt is the narrative’s lodestone. But in its 106 taut pages, a web-work of vignettes jumping back and forth in time, “Burned Child Seeks the Fire” manages to accomplish a good deal more. Edvardson combines concentration-camp recollections, a searching of her complex and tormented childhood in a fractured Catholic-Jewish family and an account of the paradoxes of being a survivor, so deftly that they become a single story. The girl (as the author calls herself) was the out-of-wedlock child of an extravagant and emotionally needy mother, a novelist living largely in fantasy, and grew up both nourished and estranged by the poetry and obliviousness surrounding her. “The girl had of course always known that something was wrong with her” begins the book, and this nameless stain colors every aspect of her existence. Jewishness, lack of a father, the tendency to wet her pants, occasional unfathomable beatings, her refusal (and inability) to “be like the others” contribute to her stoic, stubborn pride in being different. As life begins to warp under Nazi encroachment, she thinks with heartbreaking ingenuousness that “her fog-shrouded world, felt-gray with blurred contours, would be brightened by the yellow Jewish star.” Details of camp existence loom before us with the concise unreality of a horrifying fairy tale. At one point, she is assigned to work for Dr. Josef Mengele, placing color-coded crosses in his meticulous account books as he sorts his victims out for various types of death. Edvardson’s scalding account of the girl’s reentry into life after the war, the autism, rage, despair and, bit by bit, meaning, is just as harrowing. Without self-pity, she describes her eventual need to settle in Jerusalem among others who are equally obsessed with death, memory and survival, and, thus, at the end, explains her title.