Review - A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal
Autobiography of a Young Boy Who Survived Auschwitz
Jun 24, 2009
A Lucky Child (Profile, 2009) may seem an odd title for a memoir encompassing such a harrowing childhood. Buergenthal cannot credit his survival to any single factor, but rather a series of circumstances that together helped him to avoid the fate of so many others.
A Lucky Child
Thomas’s father left Germany shortly before Hitler came to power, in order to escape the rising tensions against Jews. He opened a hotel in Lubochna, Slovakia where he met his wife Gerda and Thomas was born. When the German army marched into Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Buergenthal family is forced to flee to Poland. They join other German Jewish refugees in Katowice, but after the invasion of Poland they are moved to the ghetto in Kielce.
Thomas’s life becomes what he calls “a gradual immersion into hell”. He describes the harsh day to day existence in the ghetto and the advent of the liquidation of the ghetto, when the majority of people were sent to be massacred at Treblinka. It is only his father’s position as head of the ghetto Werkstatt that saves the family, and they are kept in a labour camp to work. Eventually however they are sent to Auschwitz.
Separated from his mother, Thomas and his father continue to struggle for their lives. Again it is only circumstance that allows Thomas to escape death, as other children were killed on arrival at Auschwitz. As the war progresses, Thomas is also separated from his father and is one of the few surviving prisoners who must embark on the Death March to Sachsenhausen in Germany.
After Sachsenhausen is liberated, Thomas is taken along with a group of Polish soldiers to Berlin and eventually is placed in a Jewish orphanage in Poland, where he waits to find whether any of his family have survived.
Odd Nansen and Tommy
In the Sachsenhausen infirmary, Thomas met Norwegian prisoner-of-war Odd Nansen. After the war, Nansen describes his interaction with the young boy in his diaries that were published in Norway in 1947. Unbeknownst to Thomas, he became well-known in Norway, as the “Angel Raphael of the Revier”. Eventually he established contact with Nansen, who not only later wrote a biography of Thomas’ life entitled Tommy, but also founded UNICEF.
Buergenthal’s Life After the War
After the war, Thomas returned to his mother’s hometown of Göttingen in Germany. He attended school here, but in 1951 he immigrated to the United States. With a doctorate from Harvard Law School, he became the first US judge and later President of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and joined the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where he currently resides.
In his foreword to A Lucky Child, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel discusses how while each testimony of the Holocaust can seem to tell the same story, each is individual. He notes that Buergenthal’s “voice of the future world court judge strikes us by its need to seek out strains of humanity, even in the very depths of hell”.
Despite being written in English, A Lucky Child was first published in Germany, and appeared in more than half a dozen other languages before it was published in English. This was simply due to the fact that it was believed that “Holocaust books don’t sell”. Thankfully this was rectified with its publication by Profile in the US and Little, Brown in the UK.
Buergenthal’s incredibly young age at the time of his incarceration in Auschwitz makes his story unique, and his later experiences as a human rights advocate demonstrate that the world has not yet fully learned the lessons from the Holocaust. A Lucky Child is an inspirational story, moving and hopeful, despite the darkness of humanity that it discusses.
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