Comments (0)A Lucky Child: A Memoir Of Surviving Auschwitz As A Young Boy
July 03, 2009Barbara Pash
Associate Editor
Thomas Buergenthal
Little, Brown and co. 2009, 230 pages (hardcover,) $24.99
Thomas (known as Tommy) Buergenthal was born in 1934 in Czechoslovakia where his German-born parents had fled in hopes of escaping the growing Nazi menace in their native country. That hope proved futile.
Soon, the family was forced to flee to Poland, where they ended up in the Jewish ghetto of Kielce, a city with about 20,000 Jews. It’s a sadly familiar story of starvation, random violence, brutal round-ups and forced labor.
Eventually, almost the entire Jewish community were sent to their deaths in Treblinka. Tommy and his parents were sent to a labor camp that, a year later, was closed. In 1944, Tommy, by now10 years old, and his mother and father, were sent to Auschwitz.
Because the group came from a labor camp, the SS assumed that all the people in the transport were fit and that there were no children among them. Thus, there was no “selection” when his train arrived. This was the first of many lucky circumstances that enabled Tommy to survive.
He attributes his amazing survival in Auschwitz to a number of factors. His father protected him. He was befriended and protected by other adult inmates. He spoke German and he arrived at the camp late in the war. After the war, Tommy ended up in a Jewish orphanage in Poland where, amazingly, his mother found him in 1946. His father did not survive.
After the war, Mr. Buergenthal emigrated to the U.S. and had a distinguished legal career. He is currently the American judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Mr. Buergenthal has a personal story to tell and he does so in a heartfelt but simplistic manner. He was a child at the time, so there is much he either doesn’t know or understand. People come into his life and then disappear, he knows not where. Things happen for reasons he can’t explain. Given the number of Holocaust books, another choice might make for a more interesting read.
Clara’s War: One Girl’s Story of Survival
June 26, 2009Rochelle Eisenberg
Staff Reporter
Clara Kramer
Ecco 2009, 352 pages (hardcover), $25.99
At first, there was that hesitation; another Holocaust memoir. What could be written that I hadn’t read before?
Yet, “Clara’s War,” the memoir of Clara Schwarz Kramer who hid in a shallow bunker with 18 other Jews, was something special. It is a heart-wrenching and in some ways a love story to the righteous gentiles who hid them.
Mrs. Kramer was a young teen living in Zolkiew, Poland, with her family when the Nazis occupied her town. “Clara’s War” is based on the diary she kept during more than 20 months in hiding.
They, along with four other families, lived in the bunker, while a family named the Becks lived above. Valentin Beck, or Beck as he was known, was an ethnic German; his wife, who had previously been the Schwarz’s housekeeper, was Polish.
Before the war, Beck had a reputation as an alcoholic, womanizer and loud-mouthed anti-Semite. Yet, during their months of hiding, he and his wife provided food, hope and news of the outside world to the Jewish families. They even invited the families up one Christmas to share in their celebration.
Over the months, the families survived a fire on the street that destroyed all the other homes, as well as Nazi trainmen and SS men who roomed directly above them. Through a combination of luck and kindness — several other Jewish families were discovered and killed the last week of Nazi occupation — the families survived. Of the 5,000 Jews in Zolkiew before the war, 60 survived.
After the war, the Becks were arrested by the Soviets who now controlled the region. It was only when Clara shared her diary that they were released.
Today, Ms. Kramer lives in New Jersey and her diary is housed in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
This amazing story of survival demonstrates the true meaning of righteousness and humanity. It’s a must-read.