Abstract
This paper focuses on autobiographical texts that depict the childhood of authors that grew up during the World War II. We aim at the lexical stylization of the children's perspective and the rate of idealization of the childhood in the retrospective texts.
In the chosen autobiographies we can find paradoxical conflict of the nostalgic memories on the one hand and awareness of the horrors of war on the other hand. This paradox is demonstrated primarily in the autobiography of the Czech authors Ivan Klíma (Moje šílené století) and Arnošt Lustig (Zpověď).
These authors reflect the nostalgic character of their memories and they wrote about it in their autobiographies. This study deals with autobiography as a genre of non-fictional literature that refers to real characters and events, but at the same time is a literary work of art.
In connection with the nostalgic memories of the childhood we point out that there are some general narrative strategies in the non-fictional retrospective texts that are used in the composition of the autobiographies.