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

by Thomas Buergenthal

  Pages from the hotel prospectus of Haus Godal, the Buergenthal family hotel in Lubochna

  Pages from the hotel prospectus of Haus Godal, the Buergenthal family hotel in Lubochna

  The nearest high school my father could attend was located in a town some distance away. Family lore has it that, to get to that school, my father boarded for a time at the home of the flagman in charge of a strategically located railroad crossing. Trains going to and from that town would pass the crossing a few times a day. Since there was no train station nearby, the flagman would slow down the train in the morning and then again in the afternoon to enable my father to jump on and off. Later, less hazardous arrangements were made for him to attend school.

  After graduating from high school and a brief stint in the Polish army during the Russo-Polish War that began in 1919, my father enrolled in the law school of the University of Krakow. Before completing his studies, however, he left Poland and moved to Berlin. There he joined his older sister, who was married to a well-known Berlin couturier, and obtained a job with a private Jewish bank. He rose rapidly through the ranks, becoming an officer of the bank at a relatively young age due to his success in helping to manage the bank’s investment portfolio. His position at the bank and his brother-in-law’s social contacts enabled him to meet many writers, journalists, and actors living in Berlin. The rise of Hitler and the ever-increasing attacks by his followers on Jews and anti-Nazi intellectuals, quite a number of whom were friends of my father, prompted him to leave Germany and settle in Lubochna.

  Gerda Silbergleit, my mother, or Mutti to me, arrived at my father’s hotel in 1933. She came from Göttingen, the German university town where she was born and where her parents owned a shoe store. Not quite twenty-one years old at the time — she was born in 1912 — her parents had sent her to Lubochna in the hope that a vacation in Czechoslovakia would help her get over the non-Jewish boyfriend who wanted to marry her. They also thought that it would be good for their daughter to leave Göttingen for a while. There, the harassment of Jews — and, in particular, of young Jewish women — by Nazi youths roaming the streets was making life increasingly more unpleasant for her.

  When making arrangements for my mother’s stay at the hotel, her parents asked that she be met at the German-Czech border. Instead of sending his driver, my father decided to drive alone to the border, where he gave her the impression that he was the hotel’s chauffeur. She was quite embarrassed when at dinner she was seated at the table of the hotel’s owner, who turned out to be the driver she had quizzed about Mr. Buergenthal, whom her mother had described as a very eligible bachelor. Years later, whenever I heard my mother tell this story, I wondered whether her visit to Lubochna had been arranged by her parents, in part at least with a possible marriage to my father in mind, and whether, if there were such a plan, my father was in on it. Was it just a coincidence that his hotel was recommended to my grandparents by a friend who also knew my father well? I never did get the whole story, assuming there was more to it. To my mother, it was always love at first sight, and that was it!

  Gerda and Mundek Buergenthal, circa 1933

  My parents were engaged three days after they met at the German-Czech border. They were married a few weeks later, but not until my maternal grandfather, Paul Silbergleit, and then my grandmother, Rosa Silbergleit née Blum, had traveled to Lubochna to pass judgment on the bridegroom. They were apparently somewhat taken aback by the rapidity of the engagement and the prospect of a hasty marriage, but it was 1933, and there was little time for courting. I was born some eleven months later. By 1939 we were refugees on the run, only a few steps ahead of the Germans. A whole country, it seemed, had declared war on a family of three whose only crime was that they were Jews.

  Thomas with his parents, May 1937

  As I search my memory for some aspects of my brief life in Lubochna, I have a hard time separating what my parents told me from what I actually remember. My guess is that much of what I think I remember from that period I actually heard later from either my father or my mother. My mother frequently recalled that at the age of three or four I served as her interpreter when she went shopping in Slovakia. She spoke only German and the shopkeepers for the most part only Slovak. I could apparently get along in both languages. We spoke German at home when the three of us were together, and I must have picked up Slovak from my Slovak nannies.

  My only clear recollection of life in Lubochna dates back to a day in late 1938 or early 1939 when my parents told me that we had to leave our hotel. As they began to pack our belongings, they appeared to be very much in a hurry. Years later, I was told that the Hlinka Guard, a Slovak fascist party supported by Nazi Germany that controlled Slovakia, had claimed to have had a court order declaring a group close to it the owner of our hotel (my parents had purchased Erich Godal’s share in the hotel some years earlier). There was no way to successfully challenge this confiscation of our hotel. By that time, the Hlinka Guard and its followers controlled the courts, and their police threatened to expel us from the country if we resisted their takeover or failed to leave Lubochna immediately.

  Thomas leaning on a fence, Czechoslovakia, 1937

  As a result, we could take only a few suitcases with us, leaving everything else, in addition to the hotel itself, to the new “owners.” But I wanted my car to come with us! It was a little red car with pedals. I was told I could not take it along but that we would soon be back and that it would be waiting for me on our return. That car was my most treasured possession. I must have sensed that I would never see it again, for I went to the storeroom to look for it. There it was, propped up on its rear wheels, leaning against a post, surrounded by boxes and suitcases. It looked as sad as I felt. To this day, when I think back to that moment, I can still see my little red car.

  After leaving Lubochna, we lived for a time in Zilina, also in Slovakia. At first, we stayed with friends who owned the Grand Hotel in that city. I remember the name because I had a wonderful time standing at its main entrance with one of the doormen and, as was then the custom, calling out “Grand Hotel!” to passersby. They would frequently engage me in conversation and, to my delight, sometimes even tossed me a small coin.

  From the hotel, we moved to a small apartment in Zilina. Here, my mother and I were often alone. My father had found a job as a traveling salesman for a medical instrument company and spent a lot of time visiting customers in different parts of the country. My parents had apparently used most of their savings, including the money my mother had received from her parents as dowry, to enlarge the hotel in Lubochna and to buy out their former partner. Now the hotel was gone and with it the income they had depended on.

  The red car, Thomas’s favorite toy, 1937

  While we lived in Lubochna, Mutti had never had to cook. That was done by the hotel’s chef, a massive and intimidating Slovak matron, who let my father know in no uncertain terms that his young wife was not welcome in her kitchen. Now, in Zilina, things were different, and I soon realized that my mother was not a very good cook. Once she roasted a chicken without cleaning its insides very well. When my father started to eat it, he ended up with a mouthful of corn, which must have been the remains of the chicken’s last meal. Of course, he spat it all out, and they had a big fight, with my father yelling, “I thought they taught you something at that finishing school in Göttingen!” She counterattacked by reminding him of some long-forgotten incident for which he was supposedly to blame. And when he replied that that had nothing to do with her bad cooking, she accused him of changing the subject. I soon realized that she would always win these arguments, while he would end up shaking his head in utter disbelief. At times she would also make me her coconspirator when she did something she did not want my father to know. Once, when she realized that the kitchen rag she had been looking for had fallen into the pot in which she happened to be cooking, she swore me to secrecy and assured me, “Papa will not notice anything if we don’t tell.”

  One day, while
my father was out of town, the police came to our apartment and ordered my mother to pack our belongings and make sure that we would be ready to go with them within the hour. We were Jews and undesirable foreigners, we were told, and were being expelled from the country. My mother protested that we could not leave without my father but to no avail. We were taken to the police station. Its building and courtyard were already filled with other foreigners. My mother recognized some of our friends among them. People were sitting on their suitcases, children were crying, and I sensed that everybody was very afraid, just as I was.

  The Buergenthal family, already on the run — Slovakia, circa 1938

  As soon as we arrived at the police station, my mother, in her precise, clipped German, demanded to see the chief of police or the person in charge. She made a tremendous amount of noise while waving a leather-bound document with a lot of stamps on it. After a few minutes, we were taken into an office. Here a heavyset man in uniform, who was not very friendly, asked in a threatening tone of voice what all the commotion was about and who she thought she was. My mother, who seemed very tall to me at that moment, but who measured slightly less than five feet, slammed her document on the man’s desk and barked at him in German: “We are Germans!” Pointing to the document on the desk, which she called her passport, she continued in that same tone: “We are supposed to be your allies! It is an outrage that you are treating us like common criminals.” She immediately wanted to be taken to the German consul to protest this scandalous treatment, and she warned the police official that he and his superiors were going to be in very serious trouble from the German authorities for harassing Germans living peacefully in Slovakia. “Just you wait and see what will happen when my husband comes back and does not find us at home!”

  After a whispered conversation with another man and some further inspection of the passport, the officer suddenly smiled at us, got up from behind his desk, grasped my mother’s hand, and, in broken German, apologized to her profusely. This was all a big mistake; of course they were not deporting Germans living in Slovakia, only foreign Jews and other undesirables who should not have been allowed into the country in the first place. He shook my mother’s hand again, saluted, and ordered a policeman to escort us home.

  Years later, I learned that my mother’s “passport” was in fact a German driver’s license, which looked like a passport. Her German passport had been confiscated when she tried to renew it because, like other Jews living abroad, she had apparently been stripped of her German citizenship. To this day, I wonder what she would have done had the police officer been able to read German and called her bluff. The last person she wanted to talk to at that moment was the German consul.

  I continue to marvel at the courage, ingenuity, and intelligence my mother demonstrated that day, character traits she was to reveal many times over in the future, under even more difficult circumstances. Where did this young woman from a well-to-do, protective, Jewish middle-class home with barely a secondary school education derive the cunning and almost reckless gall to assess and take advantage of the weakness of those posing a serious threat to her or her family and come out the winner? As a child, I assumed that it was only natural for my mother to always know what to do. But what was then “natural” has continued over the years to inspire my profound admiration and to puzzle me, not only because she repeatedly succeeded in beating the odds when confronting the Nazi killing machine, but also because she seemed to pull off these successes at a moment’s notice with the speed of a magician. Where did that magic come from? Although I have tried, I have never quite been able to identify the intellectual and emotional source of my mother’s special gift. All I know is that she had it.

  As soon as we had returned to our apartment from the police station, Mutti exclaimed, “We were lucky this time!” But then she added, “They will be back,” and began looking for my father’s handgun. He had acquired it in Lubochna to scare off foxes and other animals that sometimes tried to get into the chicken coop behind the hotel’s woodshed. When my mother found the gun, she told me that we had to throw it away secretly so that the police would not find it the next time they came. She handled the gun very gingerly, let it slide into a paper bag, and told me not to touch it. The next day, we walked to the river and threw the gun into the water from one of the bridges. I did not understand it but felt very grown up to be participating in this highly secret operation. When my father returned, he was very angry to learn that my mother had thrown his gun away, but it was too late to do anything about it.

  A few days later, my parents decided that Slovakia was no longer safe for us and that the time had come to leave. They expected the harassment of Jews, particularly foreign Jews, to become more severe in that part of Czechoslovakia. My father was also afraid that he was on a Gestapo “Wanted” list, and if the police were to come back, they might arrest him and turn him over to the Germans. But where could we go? That was a question I heard my parents discuss over and over again in whispered tones, usually at night when I was supposed to be asleep. Eventually, they settled on Poland. It was the only country they thought we might be allowed to enter. There, moreover, my father would be able to obtain the visas that he had been promised by the British authorities in Czechoslovakia and that would allow us to travel to England as political refugees.

  Soon we were on our way to Poland. It took us a while to get very far, however, since we were trapped in the no-man’s-land between Poland and Czechoslovakia. This strip of land measured some fifty yards from border post to border post. The borders were connected by a dirt road that cut through a field. On either side of the road ran a deep drainage ditch. The Polish border post was at one end of the road, the Czech at the other. As soon as we got to the Polish side of the border, the Polish guards would order us back to the Czech side. The Czechs, in turn, would not allow us to reenter. And so it went for days. To me, the strip of road seemed much longer than it probably was because of the many times we had to move from one end to the other, carrying or pushing our suitcases while the border guards kept yelling at us not to show up again.

  We must have been stateless and have had no valid travel documents. My father probably lost his Polish citizenship under a Polish law, enacted in 1938, which stripped all Poles of their citizenship if they remained outside the country for more than five years. I do not know whether he had earlier acquired German citizenship, but if he had, he would have lost it, as my mother did, when the Nazis denaturalized Jews living abroad. As stateless persons, once in no-man’s-land we had no right to enter Poland or to return to Czechoslovakia. Every day and every night, my father would wait for the guards to change shifts on the Polish side of the border. As soon as he saw new Polish guards there, he would march us up to the guardhouse and ask to be admitted, claiming that he was a Pole. But since he lacked the necessary papers to prove it, the guards would order us to return to the Czech side. Back and forth we went, day and night. We would sleep in the field adjacent to the road between the border posts or in one of the ditches. On rare occasions, we would be allowed to sleep in the waiting room of one of the guardhouses. While we were cold most of the time, we were not hungry because the Czech or Polish farmers would sell us bread and sausages. But we were not going very far. I was tired and did not understand why nobody wanted to let us into their country.

  A week or so after we had first arrived at the border, on a day when we had again been ordered by the Poles to return to the Czech side and just as we were dragging our belongings toward that side, we were met by heavily armed German soldiers. It seems that Germany had occupied Czechoslovakia, and here we were, in the clutches of the very people we were trying to escape. I could sense that my parents were very afraid. One of the Germans, who appeared to be in charge, wanted to know who we were and what we were doing in the middle of nowhere. My father, who suddenly spoke very poor German, answered that we were Poles, that we had been here for more than a week, and that the Poles would not allow us to return to our country.
“We shall see about that,” snarled the German officer. With those words, he ordered two of his soldiers to come over and pick up our suitcases. I thought that they were going to do something terrible to us, because my mother suddenly grasped my hand very tightly and stopped me from speaking. But the German soldiers merely walked us back to the Polish border. Once there, they ordered the Polish border guards to let us pass. “These people are Poles!” yelled one of the soldiers. “I order you to let them in. You had better not send them to our side again. Things are going to be different from now on!” My father translated what the German was saying, and the Poles nodded obediently.

  That is how we got into Poland. It must have been March of 1939, for that is when Germany marched into Czechoslovakia. I was almost five years old.

  CHAPTER 2

  Katowice

  I HAVE NO RECOLLECTION OF THE FIRST DAYS after we were finally allowed to cross into Poland. We must have stayed in a boardinghouse or a rented room for a short while, and I must have slept much of the time. My first memory is of the three of us sitting in a horse-drawn hay wagon with our suitcases piled up at one end. The driver was an old man with a long white beard. He wore a black hat and spoke with my father in a language that sounded German but which I could barely understand. These were the first Yiddish words I had ever heard, and he was the first Hasidic Jew I had ever seen. I can still hear the driver say something about “a shoo,” which at the time made we wonder why he spoke of a Schuh (the German word for shoe). Only much later, when I picked up Yiddish from my playmates in the Ghetto of Kielce, did I realize that “a shoo” meant an hour in Yiddish and that the driver had told my father that it would take about an hour for us to reach our destination.