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

by Thomas Buergenthal

  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

  Foreword

  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

  Preface

  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, f
or 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.

  Had I written this book in the mid-1950s, when I made a first attempt to tell part of my story by publishing an account of the Auschwitz death march in a college literary magazine, this memoir would have conveyed a greater sense of immediacy. Unencumbered by the mellowing impact that the passage of time has on memory, particularly painful memories, I could then still clearly recall my fear of dying, the hunger I experienced, the sense of loss and insecurity that gripped me on being separated from my parents, and my reactions to the horrors I witnessed. The passage of time and the life I have lived since the Holocaust have dulled those feelings and emotions. As the author of this book, I regret that for I am sure that the reader would have been interested in that part of the story as well. But I am convinced that if these feelings and emotions had stayed with me all these years, I might have found it difficult to overcome my Holocaust past without serious psychological scars. It may have been my salvation that these memories faded away over time.

  My Holocaust experience has had a very substantial impact on the human being I have become, on my life as an international law professor, human rights lawyer, and international judge. It might seem obvious that my past would draw me to human rights and to international law, whether or not I knew it at the time. In any event, it equipped me to be a better human rights lawyer, if only because I understood, not only intellectually but also emotionally, what it is like to be a victim of human rights violations. I could, after all, feel it in my bones.

  CHAPTER 1

  From Lubochna to Poland

  IT WAS JANUARY 1945. Our open railroad cars offered little protection against the cold, the wind, and the snow so typical of the harsh winters of eastern Europe. We were crossing Czechoslovakia on our way from Auschwitz in Poland to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. As our train approached a bridge spanning the railroad tracks, I saw people waving at us from above, and then, suddenly, loaves of bread came raining down on us. The bread kept coming as we passed under one or two more bridges. Except for snow, I had eaten nothing since we had boarded the train at the end of a three-day forced march out of Auschwitz, only a few days ahead of the advancing Soviet troops. The bread probably saved my life and that of many others who were with me on what came to be known as the Auschwitz Death Transport.

  At the time, it did not occur to me to connect the bread from the bridges with Czechoslovakia, the country of my birth. That came years after the war, usually on those occasions when, for one reason or another, I was asked to present a birth certificate. Since I did not have one, I would be required to provide an affidavit, attesting — “on information and belief” — that I was born in Lubochna, Czechoslovakia, on May 11, 1934. Whenever I signed one of these documents, I would invariably have a flashback to those bridges in Czechoslovakia.

  Not long after the Communist regime collapsed in Czechoslovakia in December of 1989, I finally managed to obtain my birth certificate. It confirmed what I had claimed in my many affidavits and provided the impetus for a visit by my wife, Peggy, and me to Lubochna — she out of curiosity to see where I was born, and I in order to connect with that one piece of land on earth where I first opened my eyes.

  We reached Lubochna, a small resort town in the lower Tatra Mountains in today’s Slovakia, after driving for a few hours on winding roads, alongside noisy brooks and meandering rivers, from Bratislava, its capital. Without having planned it, we arrived in Lubochna in May 1991, almost fifty-seven years to the day of my birth there. A beautifully sunny day greeted us as we drove into this small town surrounded by the inviting, mellow mountains, which distinguish the lower Tatras from the harsher high Tatras.

  Now I understood why my father had dreamed of one day coming back to Lubochna and why my mother had loved it here. It seemed such an idyllic place. As Peggy and I walked through the town in the hope of finding what used to be my parents’ hotel, I realized that but for the official-looking pi
ece of paper that forever linked me to Lubochna, nothing else did. We never found the hotel — I later learned that it had been demolished sometime in the 1960s. Although my visit confirmed to me that Lubochna was truly the beautiful place my parents frequently talked about, I realized with considerable sadness that for my family and me this town represented little more than a historical footnote in a story that began here with the joy brought on by the birth of a child, a story that gradually gave way to what became a very different tale.

  My father, Mundek Buergenthal, had moved to Lubochna from Germany shortly before Hitler came to power in 1933. Together with friend Erich Godal, an anti-Nazi political cartoonist working for a major Berlin daily, he decided to open a small hotel in Lubochna, where Godal owned some property. The political situation in Germany was becoming ever more perilous for Jews and for those who opposed Hitler and the ideology of his Nazi party. My father and Godal apparently believed that Germany’s enthusiasm for Hitler would wane in a few years and that they would then be able to return to Berlin. In the meantime, the proximity of Czechoslovakia to Germany would allow them to follow developments there more closely and enable them to provide temporary refuge to any of their friends who might need to leave Germany in a hurry.

  My father was born in 1901 in Galicia, a region of Poland that belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War. German and Polish were the languages in which he received his primary and much of his secondary school education. His parents lived in a village on a farm that belonged to a wealthy Polish landowner whose extensive agricultural estate was administered by my paternal grandfather, an unusual occupation for a Jew at that time in that part of the world. The Polish landowner had been my grandfather’s commanding officer in the Austrian army and took him into his service when they both returned to private life. Eventually, he put my grandfather in charge of his many farms.