A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

Copyright © 2007, 2009 by Thomas Buergenthal

Foreword copyright © 2009 by Elie Wiesel

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com

First eBook Edition: April 2009

Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

ISBN: 978-0-316-07099-7

Contents

Copyright Page

Foreword

Preface

CHAPTER 1: From Lubochna to Poland

CHAPTER 2: Katowice

CHAPTER 3: The Ghetto of Kielce

CHAPTER 4: Auschwitz

CHAPTER 5: The Auschwitz Death Transport

CHAPTER 6: Liberation

CHAPTER 7: Into the Polish Army

CHAPTER 8: Waiting to Be Found

CHAPTER 9: A New Beginning

CHAPTER 10: Life in Germany

CHAPTER 11: To America

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

To the memory of my parents,

Mundek and Gerda Buergenthal,

whose love, strength of character,

and integrity inspired this book

ARE THERE RULES TO HELP A SURVIVOR DECIDE
the best time to bear witness to history? Which is better: to dare to look directly into the blinding present, no matter
how painful, or to await the detachment of hindsight — which, being less painful, is more objective?

In the literature of what we so inadequately call the Holocaust, there were prisoners who, possessed by the fear of oblivion,
defied every danger by becoming chroniclers. In the ghettos and in the death camps, and even in the shadow of the flames of
Birkenau and Treblinka, men scrounged paper and pencil to write down and preserve their daily existence in all its appalling
horror. These precious documents were discovered buried in the ground or under mountains of ash.

Following the war and shortly after their liberation from Auschwitz or Buchenwald, some survivors felt the need to speak out.
The world had to be told the truth — not only about their suffering but also about its own treachery. Others held their tongues,
mostly because they did not have the strength to relive events that had been just about unbearable. And then too, let us be
honest, people preferred not to hear what they had to say. It prevented them from clinging to their own certainties or, more
simply, from eating well and sleeping in peace.

Thomas Buergenthal is among those who chose to wait. In his case, the long delay has been rich in human experience. He was
already at the height of his career as a professor of law and as a judge before an international court when he decided to
revisit his memories.

Is his testimony just one among many, similar to so many others? Well, yes and no. At first glance, all accounts seem to tell
the same story. Sometimes we may even wonder whether it was the same German tormentor who abused, tortured, and killed the
same Jew six million times. And yet, each story retains its own identity, its own voice.

The 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.

Kielce, Henryków, Birkenau, Gliwice, and Sachsenhausen — Buergenthal was among the youngest of prisoners in all these places
of pain and damnation, where the power of evil and death seemed absolute. Being a mere ten years old in Birkenau made him
a rarity, if not almost unique. How did he escape the brutality of the bosses, the agonies of hunger, the fatal diseases,
and the selections? More simply put, how did he survive? If he believed in God, he might have evoked divine intervention,
but he attributes his survival to luck. As a matter of fact, a clairvoyant had predicted as much to his mother: her son would
be lucky. He remembers her saying so.

In the beginning there was the ghetto, with its famished wraiths, its nights of fear, its defeats; profession, wealth, and
lineage counted for nothing there. Inside the primal nightmare, a most orderly chaos.

Then, deportation: the nocturnal passage into the unknown. Was it simply by chance that Thomas avoided the scrutiny of the
infamous Doctor Mengele upon his arrival at Birkenau? Was there a tangible explanation for his luck? On another occasion,
during a selection, the boy was bold enough to announce in German to a commandant that he could work. Amazingly, the commandant
pulled him from the group already marked for death. Other boys his age had already gone to “the other place,” up there in
the clouds, whereas he, Thomas, was still alive. One day, he was astonished to catch a glimpse of his mother in the women’s
camp.

How can those who have never been put to the test understand how human nature may bend under duress? Why does one man become
a pitiless Kapo and victimize an old friend or even his own relative? What makes one man choose to exercise power through
cruelty, while another — from exactly the same background — refuses to do so in the name of enfeebled and downtrodden humanity?

Thomas watches, learns, and remembers. Firing squads. Hangings. The prisoner who, not wishing to lose his dignity, kisses
the hand of the unfortunate friend condemned to serve as his executioner.

In fact, even in the terrible camp at Sachsenhausen, Thomas finds friends — older than he, men from his own district or from
faraway places like Norway — who help him.

Thomas’s stories from the days following liberation resemble earlier accounts in their thirst to understand what man, pushed
to the very limits, is capable of.

As a child in Göttingen, Germany, he dreamed of going out onto the balcony with a machine gun in his hand to seek vengeance.
Later, that dream shamed and humbled him. The same townsmen who, under Hitler, had turned their backs on their Jewish neighbors
now embrace them. And Thomas, who has come to Göttingen to be with his mother, does not judge them collectively guilty.

Would he have written the same book fifty years ago? There is no knowing. But he has written it. That alone is what matters.
And the reader must surely be thankful to him for it.

— Elie Wiesel

THIS BOOK SHOULD PROBABLY HAVE BEEN WRITTEN MANY
years ago when the events I describe were still fresh in my mind. But my other life intervened — the life I have lived since
I arrived in the United States in 1951, a life filled with educational, professional, and family responsibilities that left
little time for the past. It may also be that, without realizing it, I needed the distance of more than half a century to
record my earlier life, for it allowed me to look at my childhood experiences with greater detachment and without dwelling
on many details that are not really central to the story I now consider important to tell. That story, after all, continues
to have a lasting impact on the person I have become.

Of course, I always knew that someday I would tell my story. I had to tell it to my children and then to my grandchildren.
I believe that they should know what it was like to be a child in the Holocaust and to have survived the concentration camps.
My children had heard snippets of my story at the dinner table and at family gatherings, but it was never the whole story.
It is, after all, not a story that lends itself to such occasional telling. But it is a story that must be told and passed
on, particularly in a family that was, for all practical purposes, wiped out in the Holocaust. Only thus can the link between
the past and the future be reestablished for our family. For example, I never really managed to tell my children, in the proper
context, how my parents behaved during the war and the strength of character they displayed at a time when other people under
similar circumstances lost their moral compass. The story of their courage and integrity enriches the history of our family,
and it must not be allowed to be buried with me.

I also wanted to recount my story to a wider audience, not because I think that my early life was all that noteworthy in the
grand scheme of things, but because I have long believed that the Holocaust cannot be fully understood unless we look at it
through the eyes of those who lived through it. To speak of the Holocaust in terms of numbers — six million — which is the
way it is usually done, is to unintentionally dehumanize the victims and to trivialize the profoundly human tragedy it was.
The numbers transform the victims into a fungible mass of nameless, soulless bodies rather than treating them as the individual
human beings they were. Each of us who lived through the Holocaust has a personal story worth telling, if only because it
puts a human face on the experience. Like all tragedies, the Holocaust produced heroes and villains, ordinary human beings
who never lost their humanity and those who, to save themselves or for a mere piece of bread, helped send others to the gas
chambers. It is also the story of some Germans who, in the midst of the carnage, did not lose their humanity.

For me, the individual story of each Holocaust survivor is a valuable addition to the history of the Holocaust. It deepens
our understanding of this cataclysmic event that destroyed forever not only European Jewry as such but also its unique culture
and character. That is why I tried to write my story as I remember living it as the child I was, not as an old man reflecting
on that life. The latter approach would have deprived the story of its character as the contemporaneous personal testimony
of one child-survivor of the Holocaust.

This book contains my recollections of events that took place more than six decades ago. These recollections, I am sure, are
colored by the tricks that the passage of time and old age play on memory: forgotten or inaccurate names of people; muddled
facts and dates of events that took place either earlier or later than recounted; and references to events that did not happen
quite as I describe them or that I believe I witnessed but may have only heard about. Because I did not write this book sooner,
I could not consult those survivors who were with me in the camps or compare my recollections of specific events with theirs,
and that I regret very much. Most of all, I regret that I could not discuss the details with my mother. Also, despite my best
efforts, I have found it difficult, if not impossible, particularly in the book’s first two chapters, to distinguish clearly
between some events I actually remember witnessing and those I was told about by my parents or overheard them discuss. All
I can say is that as I wrote about them, I seemed to remember them clearly as firsthand experiences.

Although the chapters of this book are organized in chronological order, I have not necessarily recounted the individual events
or episodes in that same order within the chapters. After all these years, I can recall particular events or episodes, frequently
very clearly, but not exactly when they occurred. To the child I was, dates and time had no significance. As I try to recall
that period of my life, I realize that I did not think in terms of days, months, or even years, as I would today. I grew up
in the camps — I knew no other life — and my sole objective was to stay alive, from hour to hour, from day to day. That was
my mind-set. I measured time only in terms of the hours we had to wait to receive our next meal or the days remaining before
Dr. Mengele would most likely mount another of his deadly selections. Thus, for example, when starting to write this book,
I had no idea when in 1944 I arrived in Auschwitz. I obtained that information only after consulting the Auschwitz archives.
The Internet provided me with the date of the liquidation of the Ghetto of Kielce and that of my liberation from Sachsenhausen.
This is the extent of my research for the book; the rest of the story I tell is based on my own recollections.