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

by Thomas Buergenthal

  By the time I arrived in Göttingen, I probably had no more than half a year, if that, of formal education, all of it in that Polish school in Otwock. I was therefore not ready to be enrolled in a German school with children my age. After making some inquiries, Mutti found a retired high school teacher who tutored me for a little over a year. During that year, I made up the six or seven years of school I had missed. My tutor, Otto Biedermann, had been expelled from Upper Silesia when it was taken over by Poland and came to Göttingen as a refugee. He was a wonderful teacher who, probably more than any of the teachers I had thereafter, introduced me to the joy of learning. I would come to him every morning for a period of two hours, then work on the homework he would assign, which he corrected the next day. Initially, of course, he had to teach me how to read and write — the basics of what children learn in the first couple of grades — before he could introduce me to all the other material I would have learned if I had been able to attend school like other children my age. That meant that Mr. Biedermann had to make sure that I studied the following subjects, among others: German, English, history, geography, and mathematics.

  The balcony in Göttingen, where Thomas fantasized about mounting a machine gun

  To improve my reading skills, Mr. Biedermann introduced me to the books of Karl May, the famous German writer of Wild West books set in America that have captivated German children since the late nineteenth century, when they first appeared. My reading skills increased dramatically as I devoured these books, learning all about cowboys and Indians and the American frontier from an author who had never set foot in that country, but whose imagination and research made up for his lack of firsthand knowledge. His books were filled with suspense, making it very difficult for me to put them down. Once I had significantly improved my reading skills with Karl May’s books, it proved easier for Mr. Biedermann to get me to read other books and thus, gradually, introduce me to the works of German literature that students my age had to read at school.

  To improve my writing skills, he insisted that I write a brief essay every morning, describing what I had seen on my way from my home to his. Under normal circumstances, it would take me about fifteen minutes to walk to his house. Since I would soon run out of new things to report unless I varied my route, I got up earlier and earlier each morning to look for new ways to reach his home. On the way, I would see parts of town I had never seen before. I encountered all kinds of people in the streets and would try to guess who they were and where they were going. In those days, the streets of Göttingen, like those of other German cities, still provided ample evidence of the terrible human suffering the war had visited on ordinary Germans. I would see amputees, people whose faces had been disfigured by burns in the most bizarre ways, and some who had been blinded in one or both eyes. Many of these individuals still wore all or part of their faded military uniforms. I would pass people who, judging from their demeanor and clothing, looked like refugees. These daily discoveries made it easier to write the essays Mr. Biedermann demanded of me and led to interesting discussions about contemporary realities that I would never have encountered in school.

  Mr. Biedermann once told Mutti that teaching me was an experience like none he had ever had. On the one hand, he told her, I was a child who lacked even the most rudimentary educational background and needed to be tutored as if I were a six year old; on the other hand, I had the life experience and maturity of a grown-up and could discuss subjects with him that no child my age would normally be aware of or interested in. While learning German and European history, I would ask him about life during the Nazi period and the reasons why he thought the Nazis had come to power, whether he had known any Nazis and what kind of people they were. I wanted to know about his expulsion from Upper Silesia and whether he blamed the Poles or Hitler for what happened to him and the other refugees. When studying geography, we talked about places I knew, countries I would want to live in, what types of people made up their populations, the foods they grew, and the animals that could be found there. Learning was fun with him, and I missed that sort of learning very much when I eventually entered school.

  The only subject Mr. Biedermann did not feel competent to teach me was math — he had alerted Mutti to that fact and suggested that she find me a math tutor — but since I had no interest in or talent for math, I was pleased that we neglected that subject for some time until Mutti contracted a university student to provide me with the math background I needed to be ready for school.

  When I returned to Göttingen for a brief visit a few years after emigrating to the United States, one of the first people I wanted to see was Mr. Biedermann. I had so much to tell him. He was interested in a great many things, and I knew that he would want to hear about my studies in America, about life there, about the books I was reading, and so on. When I called his home, I learned that he had had a stroke and was in the hospital. Of course, I went to visit him there. He recognized me as I walked into his room, and while he could not speak, he squeezed my hand and held on to it for a long time. I am sure that he knew that I had come not only to say good-bye but to thank him for laying the intellectual foundation for the life I was destined to live.

  There were two high schools for boys in Göttingen in my time (in those days schools were still segregated by gender): one emphasized classical studies, such as Latin and ancient Greek; the other, which is now known as the Felix-Klein-Gymnasium, focused on modern languages and contemporary subjects. When Mr. Biedermann decided that I was ready for school, I opted for the Felix-Klein-Gymnasium and was admitted some time in 1948. * I was very pleased that I was admitted to the grade that I would have been in had I entered primary school with my classmates. That made it much easier for me to become fully integrated into the life of the school.

  I was the only Jewish student in the school. That had one great advantage: it meant that I was allowed to play in the school yard during the one or two hours a week that religion was taught. As a rule, a Protestant clergyman or theologian would teach this course to the Protestant students in my class, and a Catholic priest to the Catholic students. I was excused from the religion course because, it was explained to me, there was no rabbi in town to teach me. Of course, I was delighted not to have to attend any religion classes. Not surprisingly, some of my classmates envied my special status, since they too would have loved to have been excused from taking religion.

  None of my classmates had ever met a Jew, but, as some told me later, they had seen Nazi cartoons depicting Jews as dark-skinned, alien-looking people with long crooked noses, black beards, and rapacious faces that were intended, because of their caricatured ugliness, to illustrate the repulsive character of Jews. That is probably why some of my classmates asked, on first learning that I was Jewish, whether I really was a Jew, for, as they put it, “You do not look like one.” Others were surprised that I was good at sports, quite strong, and not afraid to defend myself when challenged by the class bullies. They had obviously been exposed to Nazi propaganda that described Jews as weaklings, cowards, and lacking all aptitude in sports. Soon, though, after the initial awkwardness and the novelty of having “a real Jew” in their class, I was accepted by my classmates as one of them, and, what is more, I gradually came to feel that I was indeed one of them. I never heard any anti-Semitic remarks from my fellow students, not even when I got into the typical schoolboy shoving matches with one or the other of them, nor did I ever sense that they harbored anti-Semitic feelings that they were hiding from me. But as I reflect now on those years, I am struck by the fact that I do not remember any of my classmates or my teachers asking about my life in German concentration camps, even though it was no secret that I spent the war years in these camps. Was it that they did not want to hear about my past, or did they believe that I would find it painful to talk about it? I do not know the answer.

  Although my classmates accepted me, I could not help but feel that my presence made some of my teachers rather uncomfortable. Quite a number of them had be
en members of the Nazi party. After the war, they had to submit to the denazification process instituted by the occupation authorities and had to be cleared before they were allowed to teach again. I do not know how many former teachers had failed to pass this process, but the impression current at the time was that many a real Nazi — in contrast to the innocuous “Mitläufer,” or “fellow traveler,” one who had joined the Nazi party not out of conviction but for economic or other reasons — slipped through the denazification net and was reinstated. In these early postwar years, most of these people were afraid to voice their opinions. It was not surprising, therefore, that I was not subjected to any overt anti-Semitism, although I sensed that some of them were always on guard because I was in their class and because of their own past. They carefully avoided expressing their own opinions on certain “sensitive” issues that came up in class. I had the feeling, and that is all it was, that some of them may have been denazified without ever eschewing their Nazi views. Only once did some of these sentiments come to the fore. During a class discussion, and I no longer remember in which class it was, the teacher burst out with a harangue about the Allied bombing of Hamburg and the large loss of life. It was barbaric and unprecedented, he claimed. I raised my hand and asked, “What about the German bombing of London? Shouldn’t we also speak about that? And what about all the people who were murdered in Nazi concentration camps?” Well, the man turned crimson and gave some explanation that equated the concentration camps to the Allied bombings, which prompted me to walk out of the classroom, a totally unheard of step in a German school in those days. My mother, of course, immediately complained to the school’s director, and the teacher apologized in due course and said that I had misunderstood him. It was clear to me, though, that he apologized only for fear of losing his job. One of my mother’s friends who had lived in Göttingen during the war chided her for not seeking the teacher’s dismissal because the man was, as her friend put it, “ein alter Nazi” (a committed Nazi) who should never have been allowed to teach again.

  We learned a great deal of history in our school, but it was mainly ancient and medieval German and European history. Contemporary history was simply ignored. Not only were the Second World War, its causes, and the rise of Hitler never discussed but neither was the First World War, which, if I remember correctly, seemed too current a subject to be dealt with. That was in sharp contrast, of course, to the impressive efforts made in later years by the West German education authorities, who drastically revised their school curricula to permit and encourage students to confront the past honestly and to foster a democratic spirit of openness. Regrettably, that was not the case when I was at school in Göttingen. I was struck by the difference when I came to the United States and enrolled in an American high school in 1952. Being used to the oppressive discipline that in those days still reigned in German schools, I found the atmosphere in my American school almost too free and undisciplined. What most impressed me, though, was the freedom that American teachers tolerated and encouraged when it came to the expression of student views on almost any subject under discussion. We had a large number of student clubs and associations with elected officers in my American high school; a schoolwide student government with a panoply of officers; and annual elections for all those offices with election campaigns, pamphlets, and speeches mirroring American political elections. Whatever one might think of the academic quality of American high school education, the American classroom struck me as a veritable incubator of a democratic way of life, something the German classroom in my day certainly was not.

  I spent a great deal of my free time in Göttingen on sports. I joined a table tennis club and a sports club, and played soccer to exhaustion with Fritz Schügl and other boys from school and from the neighborhood. I swam in the city’s outdoor pool and in an abandoned stone quarry that was supposed to be off-limits. Fritz and I explored the countryside on our bikes and spent hours cleaning and oiling them. When I developed an interest in girls, we would join our classmates in the evenings, parading up and down the main street while ogling the girls and trying to arrange dates with them. There were parties and dancing and some drinking. In short, I lived the very normal life of a German teenager.

  There were only a handful of Jews in Göttingen when I arrived there. Most of them were quite old. The unelected leader of this minuscule Jewish community was Richard Gräfenberg, the scion of one of the oldest, if not the oldest, Göttingen Jewish family, whose ancestors had received a “Freibrief” (license), allowing them to settle in the town as early as the late Middle Ages. Mr. Gräfenberg, who by the time I met him was very old, had been able to live peacefully in Göttingen throughout the war, apparently because his wife was not Jewish and also because she had good connections to the town’s Gestapo chief. Gräfenberg had been able to keep his family home, which consisted of a large house and a beautiful garden with many fruit trees. From time to time, I was allowed to pick some of the apples, pears, and plums growing in his garden, a special privilege in those days of scarcity of almost everything edible. Mutti, who acted as Mr. Gräfenberg’s deputy community leader — that sounds almost funny now, considering that there were probably no more than six or seven Jews in town, including us — had to visit him every month in connection with the distribution of the food packages the community received from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. They had to be picked up from Hildesheim, the town’s district seat, or from the former concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, which functioned as a displaced persons’ camp at the time. It was Mutti’s job to make these trips, and I would occasionally accompany her. The packages contained not only food but also American cigarettes and coffee, both highly valued black-market currency items in those early postwar days. These could be traded for just about anything, from butter and meat to Persian rugs and jewelry. The people distributing the packages in Hildesheim and Bergen-Belsen not only tried to cheat us but would also suggest that Mutti was a fool not to claim that there were more Jews living in Göttingen in order to keep the surplus for herself. That would make her terribly angry, and on the way back she would always complain that the wrong people had survived the camps. It annoyed her even more when I reminded her that we too had survived. Of course, she was thinking of my father and would assert that, if he had lived, he would long ago have cleared those thieves out of the distribution centers. After Mr. Gräfenberg died, Mutti succeeded him as president.

  As soon as I arrived in Göttingen, Dr. Reitter became my surrogate father. He was a gentle, kind, and most patient human being whom I came to love and admire. He helped me with my homework, taught me how to study, and encouraged me to read and to discuss what I had read. I was also very much attracted to his extensive medical library, particularly the anatomy and dermatology books with pictures of naked women, which I studied surreptitiously when neither he nor Mutti were around. Although Dr. Reitter had been a pediatrician in Poland, he decided to specialize in dermatology in Göttingen because, as he put it, “Pediatrics is too strenuous a medical specialty for someone with my heart problems,” and he would add, “I no longer have the strength to make house calls.” I had noticed that he would swallow some heart medication from time to time, particularly when we had to walk uphill from town toward the Wagnerstrasse where we lived. Once in a while he would take me to visit the university’s dermatology clinic, show me the wards where patients with venereal diseases were housed, and explain how some of these diseases were contracted and what happened to people in the final stages of these ailments. I loved those excursions with him and decided that I would one day study medicine. In the meantime, I used to practice writing my signature in the German way with the doctor title — Dr. med. Thomas Buergenthal — I expected to earn.

  Our excursions to these clinics became gradually less and less frequent. I noticed that whenever we had to walk up even the smallest incline, Dr. Reitter would have to stop often and take his heart pills. He complained of chest pain and found it increasingly harder to bre
athe after even the slightest exertion. As that pain got more intense, his cardiologist decided to have him admitted to the hospital; I believe he may have had a minor heart attack. Mutti, who had never had any experience with heart disease, thought at first that he was exaggerating the problem, but once she realized how serious his condition was, she worried day and night about his health and threw all her nervous energy into his recovery effort. In those days before heart bypasses and angioplasties, doctors prescribed rest and more rest for his angina pectoris and mild heart attack, if that is what it was. Dr. Reitter was also given a variety of injections, but nothing seemed to help. Whenever I went to visit him, we would talk about his recovery prospects, which he felt were increasingly less promising. From time to time, he would draw a picture of the inside of his heart and show me where his blood vessels appeared to be blocked and why his heart did not get the blood it needed. Once in a while, when a nurse was very busy, he would show me how to give him an injection he needed — it was usually morphine — and I became quite good at dispensing it. Increasingly, though, he was getting weaker, particularly as water began to accumulate in his lungs and had to be drawn out with greater frequency. Then one day he told me that he would soon die and that it would be up to me to take good care of Mutti. But I was not to tell Mutti that the end was near. Not long after our conversation, Dr. Reitter died peacefully in his sleep. This was the second time I had lost a father and Mutti a husband. At that point we both decided that there was no God in heaven, for what kind of God would permit such a good man to die so young — he was only forty-eight years old — and cause so much suffering to be visited on one small family?