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

by Thomas Buergenthal

  Epilogue

  IN THE SIX DECADES since the end of the Second World War and my liberation, I have often wondered why or how I managed to survive the camps. These reflections are not brought on by feelings of remorse that I survived while so many others did not. Rather, my focus has been on the circumstances that allowed me to survive. If there is one word that captures the conclusion to which I always returned, it is luck. But luck is only the shorthand expression for a combination of factors that allowed me to make it. There was first the fact that during the ghetto and work camp periods in Kielce, I was together with my mother and father, who not only cared for me but also engrained in me the essentials of survival. Early on in Auschwitz, after I had already been separated from my mother, my father and I were still together. That allowed him to continue to protect me and to instruct me on ways to avoid ending up in the gas chamber. Of course, the fact that I was able to enter Auschwitz without being subjected to the deadly selection process on arrival was a major piece of luck. Had there been a selection, I would never have made it into the camp, and that would have been the end of my story.

  Once I was alone in Auschwitz and later on in Sachsenhausen, it helped that by then I was a little older and had become a true child of the camps in the sense that I had learned the tricks I needed to survive. I use the phrase “child of the camps” advisedly, because I have always felt that in many ways my survival instincts had much in common with similar traits I have observed in the “street children” of Latin America, who daily face many dangers and deprivations. These kids are frequently as young as I was or even younger. I point to these children when friends express surprise on learning how young I was. Children, even relatively young children, learn to be cunning or street-smart when circumstances demand, and they are fast learners when they have to be in order to live another day. When my own children were of the age I was during the war, I frequently wondered whether these pampered American children or the children of my friends could have made it in circumstances similar to mine. I am convinced that with some luck they could have, because the survival instinct in children is strong enough to allow them to adjust to the needs of their environment. Of course, what helped me was that I had a relatively long period of survival training. Who knows whether I would have survived had I arrived in Auschwitz from a normal middle-class environment and immediately had to face the brutal camp conditions. It was luck again that I had a gradual immersion into hell. (As I write these words I am not unaware of the bizarre use of the word luck, but that is what it was in its context.)

  For my survival, I suppose it also helped that I spoke fluent, unaccented German and Polish and did not look Jewish. My German helped me on a number of occasions, as did my Aryan features; at least, that is what I think. Maybe I reminded some of the Nazi officers of their own children. This may have been a factor in the decision of the camp commandant of Kielce to let me live after I told him that I could work. Being able to speak Polish also proved useful on numerous occasions. Together, these things no doubt played a role in my survival and were entirely fortuitous.

  At times I have been asked whether I ever suffered from the so-called survivor syndrome that allegedly afflicts some survivors who torment themselves for surviving when so many others, particularly members of their families, did not. Survivor syndrome has apparently driven some survivors to suicide and left others with serious psychological problems. I have never experienced these feelings. I don’t know why, but if I were to speculate, I would attribute their absence to the instinctive belief of children in their immortality and their entitlement to live. It may also be that since I attributed my survival to sheer luck, I came to view survival and nonsurvival as a game of chance over which I had no control and was, therefore, not responsible for the outcome. How else to explain the fact that I did not catch diphtheria, even though I slept in the same bunk as my friend who came down with that very contagious disease? It could be argued, of course, that my reliance on luck to explain my survival is itself a defense mechanism against the mental ravages survivor syndrome is known to visit on survivors. And yet, it is no doubt true that luck had a great deal to do with my survival.

  Thomas in Auschwitz Birkenau, fiftyfive years after the infamous death march

  I have also wondered from time to time why I can speak and write very freely and, on the whole, unemotionally about my camp experiences, while I am unable to watch movies about the Holocaust or read books that deal with it. That is not to say that in writing this memoir, I did not have moments when I had to compose myself before going on. For example, when describing the reunion with my mother or the killing of Ucek and Zarenka, tears welled up in my eyes. Generally, however, the story just flowed out of me. And though before starting on this book, I was afraid that some of my Auschwitz nightmares might return as I began to recall seemingly longforgotten episodes, that did not happen. By contrast, when my children asked my mother to write down some of her Holocaust experiences, she started to write but had to stop after the first few pages. She told them afterward that almost as soon as she began to write, she started to cry and could not continue. Yet she could speak quite freely about these events. How to explain these quirks of the mind? Of course, the Holocaust robbed her of the best years of her life, and while she lived a relatively comfortable life after the war, it certainly was not the normal happy life she would otherwise have had or assumed she would have had. As she began to write down her war experiences for her grandchildren, the suppressed feelings about her loss no doubt reemerged. My own past did not really affect my future to the same degree.

  Nevertheless, my camp experience has had much to do with my later professional life. Unlike most of my law school classmates, I was never really interested in the traditional practice of law, that is, in doing what lawyers do in most countries: defending or prosecuting criminals, representing clients in civil disputes, dealing with domestic relations matters, or otherwise providing legal advice to individuals and companies. Instead, I was drawn to international law and to international human rights law, as that branch of international law came to be known, because I believed, somewhat naively at first, that these areas of the law, if developed and strengthened, could spare future generations the type of terrible human tragedies that Nazi Germany had visited on the world.

  Over time I also gradually concluded that I had an obligation to devote my professional activities to the international protection of human rights. This sense of obligation had its source in the belief, which grew stronger as the years passed, that those of us who survived the Holocaust owe it to those who perished in it to try to improve, each in our own way, the lives of others. To me that meant working for a world in which the rights and dignity of human beings everywhere would be protected. I also convinced myself that the international law of human rights was a field to which I, as a lawyer and because of my Holocaust experience, would be able to make a more significant contribution than to any other branch of the law. After all, I knew what it meant to be a victim of human rights violations.

  That my Holocaust experience is never entirely removed from my professional work was brought home to me while dealing with a complaint submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, on which I began to serve in 1995, by Robert Faurisson, a French denier of the Holocaust. Having been convicted by French courts for the violation of a French law making Holocaust denial a criminal offense, Faurisson challenged his conviction and the French law in a complaint filed with the Human Rights Committee. Given my personal history, I decided to remove myself from hearing the case. I did so with the following declaration: “As a survivor of the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, whose father, maternal grandparents, and many other family members were killed in the Nazi Holocaust, I have no choice but to recuse myself from participating in the decision of this case.”

  Before joining the Human Rights Committee, I had served on two major international human rights bodies: the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the U.N. Truth
Commission for El Salvador. In many ways, they turned out to be my most exciting and productive human rights activities. The first of these began in 1979 with my election as judge of the newly created Inter-American Court of Human Rights of the Organization of American States. I remained on the Court, a part-time institution modeled on the old European Court of Human Rights, for the maximum two six-year terms and served as its president for the usual two-year period.

  During the time I served on the Court, much of Latin America was ruled by military regimes and civilian dictators who were responsible for massive violations of human rights. While this was not a political climate in which a human rights court could count on the sympathetic support of many governments in the region, the Court was nevertheless able to lay a relatively solid foundation for the enforcement in the Western Hemisphere of the rights guaranteed by the American Convention. Our most important achievement during my time on the Court was the first ever international judgment holding a state — Honduras — liable for practicing a policy of forced disappearances. The government of Honduras was ordered to pay damages to the families of the victims and, what is more, fully complied with the judgment.

  The Court’s authority had been severely tested, however, in dealing with the Honduran Disappearance Cases. After testifying against the government, our first witness was murdered on a street of his hometown in Honduras. Another person whom the Court had decided to call as a witness became the next victim, under similar circumstances, before he ever had a chance to testify. To our relief, the killings of witnesses stopped as soon as the Court issued an injunction ordering the government of Honduras to ensure the safety of our witnesses, potential witnesses, and the next of kin of the victims of the disappearances. Our concern that the killing of witnesses would continue despite the injunction, with the government denying all responsibility, proved not to be justified.

  During my time on the Court, we rendered important decisions relating to freedom of speech, the protection of human rights during national emergencies, due process of law, and related subjects. All in all, because of my interest in strengthening the development of international human rights law and institutions, I found my service on the Inter-American Court a dream come true. It is one thing to theorize about solutions to these problems but quite another to achieve concrete results that strengthen the protection of human rights.

  The role that the Inter-American Court could play at the time was severely limited by the fact that some of the most serious violators of human rights in the region — among them Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and various Central American countries — had either not ratified the American Convention or had not accepted the jurisdiction of the Court. These states could consequently not be brought before the Court. Thus, while we could hear charges against Honduras, which was alleged to have been responsible for some two hundred forced disappearances, we lacked that power for Argentina which, it was claimed, was responsible for between fifteen thousand and thirty thousand forced disappearances during its so-called dirty war. The fact that international human rights courts, international criminal courts, and similar bodies have jurisdiction over only those states that accept their jurisdiction, means that states that have not done so enjoy the very impunity these tribunals are designed to end. Sad, but unfortunately true. That is why it is so important, in my opinion, that all states become parties to the Rome Treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, and why I believe that the United States should ratify it. By not joining, the U.S. government is sending the wrong message to the international community about its commitment to the international rule of law.

  As my service as judge on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights was coming to an end, the secretary-general of the United Nations appointed me to the three-member United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador. Our charge was to investigate the massive violations of human rights that had been committed during El Salvador’s twelve-year civil war, which had finally come to an end a few months earlier. Until then, I had always believed that my Holocaust experience had prepared me to deal with even the most egregious violations of human rights. In El Salvador, I found this not to be true. To see the skeleton of a baby still in the womb of a mother killed in the El Mozote massacre, where some five hundred women, children, and old men had been murdered, was more than I could take without being deeply affected by the utter depravity of those who committed this and similar crimes.

  On entering the corridor of the residence of a group of Jesuit priests in San Salvador, I was shown the portrait of Archbishop Romero, a bullet hole near his heart. This symbolic reenactment of the archbishop’s murder some years earlier was the work of the Salvadoran soldiers who, a few minutes later, went on to execute the priests and their housekeeper in the garden of their residence. The murdered priests’ only “crime,” I learned later, had been their desire to help negotiate a truce between the military and the guerrillas, something the leadership of the military feared. In El Salvador, we heard again and again that “orders are orders,” and when we asked some of the military officers and the guerrilla commanders why they had committed or ordered this or that killing, we were invariably told that it was “un error,” a mistake. Never once during our interrogations did I hear expressions of remorse or admissions of guilt; mistakes yes, guilt no. How to explain that the intentional act of the killing of an innocent human being can be written off as merely a “mistake”?

  El Salvador was a country in which many lived in fear. In this atmosphere, the victims or their next of kin often did not dare to speak about what had happened to them. People kept their suffering to themselves, hoping for justice but not really expecting it. For some people, ten years or more had gone by in silence with pent-up anger about the past. Finally someone — the commission — was listening to them, and the mere fact of telling what had happened was a healing emotional release. I was surprised to realize that despite their terrible experiences, most of our witnesses were more interested in recounting their stories than in seeking retribution.

  One interview among many others comes to mind in this connection. It involved two women, one Salvadoran and the other either Swedish or Danish. They had come to the commission together to tell the story of their children. The son of one of the witnesses and the daughter of the other had met in Europe and had fallen in love. The couple traveled to El Salvador, became involved in leftist political activities, and were murdered by the military. Their mothers had not met until they decided to testify before the Truth Commission. They told us that they wanted to honor the memory of their children by telling their story together.

  During our work in El Salvador, memories of my own past in another part of the world returned to me over and over again as we interviewed witnesses, heard their stories, and inspected the killing fields. The suffering that so many people in that small country had endured during its terrible civil war will remain forever imprinted on my soul. While in El Salvador, I often wondered whether the fact that I, with my Holocaust background, was investigating these crimes had some symbolic significance. Was it that these activities and my human rights work generally gave special meaning to my survival or that my survival compelled me, whether I knew it or not, to pursue these activities?

  In the late 1990s, I found myself serving on the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland. The CRT, as this tribunal came to be known, was set up to search for unclaimed Holocaust-related bank accounts and to help identify their owners or heirs. As its vice chairman, I had to supervise the CRT’s day-to-day operations and to adjudicate claims submitted to us. In reading the claimants’ applications and the bank files, my thoughts took me back to the 1930s, when some wealthy European Jews, vaguely sensing the fate that awaited them with the rise of the Nazis, sought to protect their money in neutral Switzerland. Many of them did not survive the Holocaust. That benefited the Swiss banks, which used the funds for more than half a century without ever accounting or expecting to account for their wind
fall.

  Working with a group of commercial arbitrators from Israel, Switzerland, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Belgium, and a support staff of some twenty young lawyers, our job consisted of trying to determine whether the information provided us by individual claimants about deceased account holders matched the information found in the files of the Swiss banks. It was no easy task. Frequently, all we had to work with was the name of the account holder and, at most, a hometown or a profession. While I tried not to let my anger at the conduct of some banks affect the job I had to do, it was not always easy. For example, there would be bank files that contained nothing but the name of the account holder, the amount of money remaining in the account, and a notation that all other information had been discarded. Not only did the banks not pay interest, they frequently depleted the accounts entirely by deducting bank fees long after they must have known that the depositors had perished in the Holocaust. There was evidence, moreover, that some banks had told Holocaust survivors seeking information about the bank accounts of relatives that no such accounts existed in the branch the survivors had identified, when they knew full well that the accounts existed in other branches.