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

Inspiration for human decency
Thank you Dr. Beurganthal for writing your incredible life story. It is not only a story of brutality. It is a revelation of how the small acts of a few individuals, not on religious or ideological grounds, but from the simple human quality of empathy, helped a young child survive.
And, most of all, thank you for not shooting a machine gun from the balcony. (Amazing restraint.)
Your memoir is an inspiration to all of us.

An inspiring autobiography
Tom Buergenthal's autobiography is morally uplifting and will sustain faith in humanity's moral potential. I am proposing that is become a required reading for every seminarian in our theological schools today. Rev. Dennis Kuby

Out of the Mouths of Babes
This Holocaust memoir is different from many in that the author was only about seven years old when his family started to be really oppressed by the Nazi juggernaut. They were removed first to a ghetto in Poland, then to Auschwitz. Then little Timmy Buergenthal went on without his parents to Sachsenhausen - and to final miraculous release. Strictly speaking, this isn't a child's contemporaneous account, such as Anne Frank's diary provided. Buerenthal wrote this book only fairly recently. He explains in his introduction that he did considerable research to piece together his recollections of his childhood into proper chronology and put them in context.

If the average adult Jewish citizen had little hope of surviving the myriad ordeals, children were even less likely to survive. Deemed unfit for any labor, young children were often immediately diverted to the lines sent to the gas chambers.

This is where the title of the book proves apt. When the Buergenthal family was still relatively happy and free, Timmy's mother went to a gypsy fortuneteller. She didn't really believe in the gypsy's powers, and yet, the soothsayer's predictions sustained her through the coming years. The gypsy woman saw that her client had a son, and she predicted that this son would always be uniquely "lucky." That turned out to be true.

Many times, it was only sheer luck that kept Timmy out of the gas chambers. Although Buergenthal also writes how he quickly became "street smart" in the way that some modern South American youths learn how to survive the extreme gang violence of their native city streets. For example, Buergenthal quickly learned to sense when another selection was about to be made and he learned how to fade out of sight on these occasions. His fluency in both Polish and German also stood him in good stead in the camps.

His narrative carries on in some detail through the early post-War years when he was resettled in Germany and went to school for the first time. He talks about his ambivalent feelings - going to class with people who were now kind to him, but who might just recently have participated as executioners of his people.

Be sure to read through to the end of the book to the Epilogue. Here Buergenthal tells how his decision to become a jurist involved in various international human rights commissions was no doubt influenced by his early experience as the victim of such terrible human rights violations. He puts his experiences in perspective here and answers many of the questions commonly put to concentration camp survivors - such as the question of whether or not he feels guilty about having survived when so many didn't. You'll find some exceptionally wise answers to these questions. You'll probably marvel at how such a sane understanding could have grown out of such a time of madness.

Miraculous Survival
I've read quite a lot of literature on the Holocaust, and I keep reading because each book teaches me something new. My recent read was "A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz" as a Young Boy by Tom Buergenthal. Buergenthal currently serves as the American judge on the International Court of Justice, and wrote the memoir to describe his experiences in concentration camps when he was just a child.

Few children survived the concentration camps - especially Auschwitz - making Buergenthal truly lucky. As children were systematically exterminated by the Nazis, he managed to escape death time and time again. Buergenthal was raised in captivity, traveling with his parents and then alone from a ghetto in Kielche to German labor camps, to Auschwitz, and finally to Sachsenhausen. At every turn, Buergenthal survived due to a mixture of wit, determination, and sheer luck. Oddly, even getting into Auschwitz was luck, since he was not subjected to selections that most prisoners arriving there went through, and narrowly escaped being sent directly to the gas chambers. Buergenthal was finally liberated at the age, and luck struck again when he was miraculously reunited with his mother almost two years later.

Buergenthal's Holocaust memories are brief, but he makes a point of all the kind acts in the midst of misery. There was the Nazi soldier who handed over his coffee to him when he was cold, the infirmary orderly who changed Buergenthal's admittance card and hence saved him from the gas chamber, and the Norwegian prisoner Odd Nansen who bribed officials to keep Buergenthal alive. I think each Holocaust memoir has a message, and I felt that Buergenthal's message was that people can be selfless and good even when they themselves are struggling to survive.

Excellent read
Shared this story with my book club. Very heartwarming and autobiographical story told by the child as a man who became a World Court Judge. I can't believe every thing he went through as a child and survived through his courage, great instincts and luck!