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

by Thomas Buergenthal

  Once we had passed this last border, I got up from my seat and stood by the window until we rolled into the Göttingen railroad station. I could not contain my excitement. I spotted my mother even before the train came to a stop. As I try to describe the emotions of that moment, I realize that I am incapable of putting into words what I felt. And even now, so many years later, tears well up in my eyes as I see her standing there, nervously scanning the slowing railroad cars for a glimpse of me. While the train was still moving, I jumped out and raced over to her. We fell into each others’ arms and stood there long after the train had moved out of the station, hugging each other and trying in just a few minutes to recount all that had happened to us since that August day in 1944 when we were separated in Auschwitz. “Und Papa?” I finally asked. She did not answer right away but kept shaking her head as tears ran down her cheeks. Right then, I knew that my father had not survived the war that was now finally over for my mother and me.

  CHAPTER 9

  A New Beginning

  AS SOON AS WE WERE TOGETHER AGAIN, Mutti and I talked and talked for days on end about everything that had happened to each of us during the two and a half years we were separated. That is how I learned that in the fall of 1944 she had been sent from Auschwitz to the notorious women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück, located about ninety kilometers from Berlin. Ravensbrück was evacuated by the SS ahead of the approaching Soviet troops toward the end of April 1945. Mutti and the other camp inmates able to walk were marched in a westerly direction until they reached Malchow, a satellite camp of Ravensbrück. Many of the women died on that march. On April 28, 1945, Malchow was liberated by advancing Soviet troops. Ironically, at that point, a mere sixty-odd kilometers separated Mutti and me, yet it took about another year and a half for us to be reunited.

  During the first week following her liberation, Mutti, together with a small group of her friends, rested in various deserted German houses they came across. There they also helped themselves to the clothing they needed and to food. Since, with the exception of Mutti, these women were all born in Poland, they decided to return to their hometowns as soon as possible in the hope of finding surviving relatives. Mutti joined them in order to get to Kielce, which was one of the meeting places she and my father had agreed on if they survived the war. She also assumed, correctly as it turned out, that others who had survived the Ghetto of Kielce would be returning to that city and would be able to provide information about my father and me in case we were not yet there.

  Mutti reached Kielce after a horrendous journey on foot and by truck and rail that lasted almost two weeks. With no money and no food other than what little she could scavenge or beg from farmers along the way, she made it to Kielce totally exhausted. During the trip, particularly after her little group had split up, she had to be very careful not to be taken for a German. Since she spoke little Polish, she decided to claim that she was Hungarian whenever asked where she came from. She did not know a single word of Hungarian, though, and could only hope that she would not run into someone who would address her in that language. She was lucky on that score but, nevertheless, gave away her German origin on one occasion. That happened when someone stepped on her foot in the back of a very crowded truck. At that moment, a mild German curse escaped her lips. Before she knew it, she was pushed off the truck, fortunate not to have been beaten or worse.

  A few dozen survivors had in the meantime returned to Kielce and established a Jewish community organization. Mutti was welcomed with open arms, since most of the people knew her from the labor camp and the Henryków factory. Provided with temporary shelter and food, she began to make inquiries about my father and me. She soon learned that my father had not survived. After he and I were separated in Auschwitz, he was sent to Flossenbürg, another German concentration camp. He died there a few days before the liberation of the camp, executed with many other inmates the SS leadership did not want to fall into Allied hands. For days, Mutti walked around in a stupor, unwilling to believe what she had been told. But as more and more survivors who had been with my father in Flossenbürg returned to Kielce and confirmed the news of his death, she had no choice but to accept it.

  None of the returnees whom Mutti approached could tell her for sure what had happened to me. Many of them knew me well from Kielce and Auschwitz, but no one had seen me after the liberation or near that time. One man thought he had seen me either on the Auschwitz Death Transport or in Sachsenhausen but was not really sure. As Mutti kept prodding them to remember whether they might have seen me after the liberation of Sachsenhausen, they tried to convince her that I could not possibly be alive. “None of the children survived,” they would tell her. “How could he have survived?” they asked gently. “After all, he was by far the youngest from Kielce.” “Now you must think of yourself and your health,” they would add, concerned about her fragile condition and her nervous exhaustion. But she would have none of it. She knew that I was alive, for hadn’t the fortune-teller proclaimed that I was a “lucky child”?

  When her search in Kielce yielded no further useful information, Mutti decided that the time had come to travel to Göttingen, which was another of the meeting places she and my father had agreed on. Returning to Germany was no easier than her earlier trip from there to Poland. Conditions along the roads were still as chaotic and as dangerous as before, and transportation equally difficult to find. But with the help of some money she had received from the Jewish community in Kielce, Mutti eventually made it to Göttingen. She reached Göttingen totally exhausted and lapsed into a depression. She was hospitalized shortly after her arrival and treated for her now acute thyroid condition. The doctors also concluded that she needed total rest. In those pretranquilizer days, Mutti was placed on an extended regimen of sleep medication. She remained in the hospital for quite a number of weeks.

  By the time Mutti left the hospital, she had regained some of her strength. It was not easy for her to find herself back in the Göttingen she remembered from her once-happy childhood and then the Nazi period. Almost as soon as the Nazis had come to power, most of Mutti’s non-Jewish school friends acted as if they had never known her. They would cross the street when they saw her approaching or look the other way in order not to have to greet her. She was treated even worse the two times she returned to Göttingen from Lubochna to visit my grandparents and show me off, her new baby. Now, after the war, these same women embraced her on the street and acted as if nothing had happened in the past.

  On the Gronerstrasse, one of the town’s two main streets where my grandparents’ home and shoe store had been located, the store’s name — “Schuhgescht Silbergleit” — could still be faintly seen under the painted-over name of the new owner, to whom my grandparents had been forced to sell the house for a pittance. Mutti was born and grew up in that house, and now all that remained of that past and of her family’s life in Göttingen were those rapidly fading letters spelling out her father’s name. It is not surprising that in those early days in Göttingen, she frequently wondered whether having survived the camps was yet another punishment she did not deserve.

  It was during that very difficult period, and as she agonized over the lack of any news of me, that Mutti was approached one day by an elderly woman who asked her to help her cross one of the busy Göttingen streets. Turning on the poor thing, Mutti screamed, “Nobody ever helped my mother across the street in this damn town!” and walked off. Years later, once the past had gradually lost its painful immediacy, Mutti would frequently recall her “shameful behavior,” as she characterized it. It bothered her that she had been so terribly mean to that woman. “After all,” she would ask, “how could I blame the old lady for what the Nazis had done to my mother?”

  Not long after leaving the hospital, Mutti walked into the bakery next to where her parents’ store had been. She was immediately recognized and lovingly embraced by Mrs. Appel, the baker’s wife. Despite Nazi orders not to fraternize with Jews, the Appels continued to maintai
n contact with my grandparents until their deportation to Warsaw and helped them whenever they could. After a happy and tearful reunion with Mutti, Mrs. Appel told her that she had something for her. She disappeared and returned a few minutes later carrying a dust-covered suitcase. “Your parents left this suitcase with us for safekeeping,” Mrs. Appel told Mutti, as she handed it to her. “We were always afraid that the Nazis would find it and punish us, but we promised your parents we’d hide it, and we did.” The suitcase contained some tablecloths and sheets, as well as a few pieces of silver. Near the bottom of the suitcase, Mutti found a batch of family photographs and some letters my grandparents had received from her and her brother, Eric, in America. For Mutti, the pictures were a treasure trove. All her family pictures, including photos of her parents, my father, and me, had been lost in the camps. Erased with the destruction of these pictures, it seemed to her, was proof that her family had ever existed. Now Mutti could again look at those images of a happier life long ago, before the Nazis destroyed it all. It was the first good thing that had happened to her since her return to Göttingen.

  The Silbergleits’ home in Germany with the shoe shop on the ground floor

  Housing was very difficult to come by in Göttingen after the war, despite the fact that the town had not been bombed. But that was precisely why the population of the city had almost doubled with an influx of German refugees who had lost their homes in the East. Mutti had been assigned an apartment, but she was not very happy with it because it was small and dark. Her problem was solved when she ran into Mr. Fritz Schügl. She knew him as the owner of a jewelry store that was located one street down from my grandparents’ store. He wanted to know whether she needed a place to stay and offered her an apartment on the second floor of his one-family home. Housing and rentals generally were very strictly controlled in those days, but concentration camp survivors were given priority and were entitled to larger apartments. When Mutti moved into the sunny apartment with a large balcony overlooking the Schügl garden, her spirits improved dramatically and with them her health.

  Throughout this period, Mutti never gave up hope of finding me. She contacted the many search bureaus in Germany and elsewhere that had sprung up after the war to help reunite families. She was also in touch with those Kielce survivors whose addresses she had been able to obtain, hoping to hear from anyone who had seen me or might have information about my whereabouts. In one of the letters she found in the suitcase Mrs. Appel had hidden for my grandparents, Mutti came across her brother’s address in the United States and immediately got in touch with him. Until then, Eric did not know that his sister had survived or what had happened to their parents. He also learned that my father had not survived and that Mutti was still looking for me. Eric thereupon contacted various Jewish organizations in the United States and in Palestine, seeking their help in finding me.

  Despite all the negative responses she received and suggestions from friends that I could not possibly be alive and that she should face this sad reality for her own peace of mind, Mutti insisted that I was alive. “I know that he is alive. I can feel it,” she would say. It was only a matter of time “before I find him,” she would tell anyone who tried to get her to face “reality.” She was dramatically confirmed in that conviction by a blurred photograph she happened to see in a newspaper. According to the photo’s caption, it showed a British soldier in Berlin walking with a group of liberated Jewish children. In that picture, Mutti was sure that she recognized me. “Here is the proof I’ve been waiting for,” she told her friends, as she showed the picture to all who had doubted that I could have survived. Although I was in Berlin at roughly the same time, I never saw a British soldier in that city, nor was I one of the children in that picture. But Mutti did not know that at the time, which was good, for the picture sustained her in her belief that I was alive and gave her the hope she needed in those difficult days.

  More than half a year after returning to Göttingen, Mutti learned that Dr. Leon Reitter, with whom she had worked in Henryków, had survived the war and was in a displaced persons camp in the American Zone, near the Dachau concentration camp from which he had been liberated by American troops. Born in Poland, he was a pediatrician who had received his medical education in Czechoslovakia because in those days only a limited number of Jews were allowed to study medicine in Poland. My parents and I came to know him in the Ghetto of Kielce; he was the doctor they called whenever I came down with a high fever or some other ailment that needed attention. Dr. Reitter and my father became close friends in Henryków and spent many hours in the evenings talking about the course of the war and what the future had in store for us. Dr. Reitter’s only daughter was killed with the other children when the labor camp was liquidated. Mutti was, of course, overjoyed that Dr. Reitter was alive and invited him to Göttingen. Although it was not easy in those days to move from one zone of Germany to another, he eventually made it. Not long afterward, they decided to get married. When I arrived in Göttingen, Dr. Reitter was by my mother’s side at the railroad station.

  As soon as we reached the apartment in the Schügl house, I began to ask hundreds of questions, and so did Mutti. The questions just rolled out, and some of the answers produced tears, but we were impatient to know what the other had gone through in the years of our separation. I heard more details about my father’s death, about Mutti’s death march out of Ravensbrück, about Dr. Reitter’s liberation from the Dachau concentration camp, and about the transport from Auschwitz to Germany that he and my father were on after we were separated. One group from that transport was apparently shipped to Dachau and the other to Flossenbürg.

  Of course, I also wanted to know how Mutti had found me in Otwock. It appears that, true to her word, Lola, my counselor at the orphanage, had placed my name on the list of children who wanted to emigrate to Palestine. The list was transmitted to the Jewish Agency for Palestine. In the meantime, my uncle Eric in the United States had sent my name to a search bureau which that agency maintained. Despite the fact that millions of people were searching for lost relatives and friends, an employee of the Jewish Agency found, among the vast numbers of research requests received by his office, a letter indicating that a Mrs. Gerda Buergenthal in Germany was looking for her child. He then somehow remembered that, days earlier, he had seen the identical name on a list of children from an orphanage in Poland who wanted to be brought to Palestine. Considering that the person at the Jewish Agency was performing this search manually in those precomputer days, it borders on the miraculous that he managed in this fashion to make the connection between my mother and me. It is not surprising, therefore, that whenever Mutti told the story of how we were reunited, she would declare that it had been “beschert” (preordained). “After all,” she would proclaim, “the fortune-teller in Katowice already predicted it.”

  The Jewish Agency immediately informed my uncle in the United States, who contacted my mother. Unable to travel to Poland after hearing that I was alive and afraid to write to me in German, Mutti had Dr. Reitter write to the orphanage in Polish. That was the letter I was convinced had been sent by someone who wanted to adopt me. In the meantime, at the request of my uncle, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee embarked on its efforts to reunite me with my mother.

  Some ten years later, on her first visit to Israel, Mutti passed a building identified as the headquarters of the Jewish Agency. Without a moment’s hesitation, she went in and asked to speak to someone in charge. She then explained that she had come to thank the agency for reuniting her with her son. While no one remembered the case of the boy in the Otwock orphanage who found his mother with the agency’s help, she was given a joyous reception because, she was told, this was the first time anyone had come to thank the agency for bringing a family together.

  CHAPTER 10

  Life in Germany

  WHEN I ARRIVED IN GERMANY at the end of December 1946, I was twelve and a half years old. During my first few days there, I did not let Mut
ti out of my sight. I kept kissing her and holding on to her, probably because I wanted to assure myself that I was not just dreaming and that we were really together again. It was such a wonderful feeling to be with my mother, to know that I was no longer alone in this world, that she loved me and would take care of me. Almost as soon as I first embraced her at the train station, I felt that a tremendous burden had been lifted from my shoulders and put on hers: now Mutti was again responsible for me. As I reflect on this attitude, I realize that it was probably a product of the selfish sentiments of a child: Until then, I had been responsible for my own life, for my survival; I could not afford to depend on anyone but myself; I had to think and act like a grown-up and be constantly on the alert against all possible dangers. But once I was back in her arms, I could be a child again, leaving these worries and concerns to her.

  Portrait of Thomas taken in 1947, shortly after his arrival in Germany

  During much of the time I was separated from Mutti, I did not have many opportunities to speak German and lost some of my fluency. Within a week or two of coming to Göttingen, though, I was once again comfortable speaking German and even lost the slight Polish accent Mutti claimed I had acquired during my time in the Polish army and at the Otwock orphanage. It helped that young Fritz Schügl, the son of our landlord, lived with his family on the ground floor of our house. He was only two years older than I, and we became inseparable friends in no time.

  From our balcony on the Wagnerstrasse, I could look over the garden on to the street below. The street — Hainholzweg — was a popular pedestrian route leading into the countryside east of the city. It attracted many Göttingen residents, particularly on Sundays, when entire German families would pass our house on their way to and from their walks. I would observe them from our balcony with envy and hatred. Here were fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, walking with their children and grandchildren — people who, for all I knew, had killed my father and grandparents! As I contemplated these scenes of happy Germans enjoying their lives as if nothing had happened in the recent past, I longed to have a machine gun mounted on the balcony so I could do to them what they had done to my family. It took me a long time to get over these sentiments and to recognize that such indiscriminate acts of vengeance would not bring my father or grandparents back to life. It took me much longer to realize that one cannot hope to protect mankind from crimes such as those that were visited upon us unless one struggles to break the cycle of hatred and violence that invariably leads to ever more suffering by innocent human beings.