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.