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

by Thomas Buergenthal

  Dr. Leon Reitter, 1947

  It took Mutti and me a long time to get over Dr. Reitter’s death, if we ever did. Her thyroid condition began to act up again and with it her irregular heartbeat. We tried to console each other without much success, but we both knew that life had to go on and that we had to make the best of it. Our daily routine was interrupted one afternoon by an event that brought some happiness and excitement into our lives. Not long after I had arrived in Göttingen from Otwock, I told Mutti and Dr. Reitter about the Norwegian who had helped me so much in the Sachsenhausen infirmary and who probably saved my life. Although I had forgotten his name, I remembered that one day, when he brought me a jar of cookies he had received through the Swedish Red Cross, he pointed to the picture of a man on the side of the jar and said that it was his father. When Mutti heard my cookie-jar story, she suggested that the man whose son I knew in Sachsenhausen probably was a cookie manufacturer and that it was most unlikely that I would ever find him. But then, sometime in early 1948, Mutti saw an article in a newsletter published by an organization of former concentration camp inmates. The article reported that a Norwegian by the name of Odd Nansen, son of the famous Norwegian explorer and statesman Fridtjof Nansen, had recently published the diary he had kept in various camps in Norway as well as in Sachsenhausen, and that it had become the most widely read book in Norway. * After showing me the article, Mutti suggested that I write the author of the book and ask whether he could help me find the person who had been so kind to me in Sachsenhausen. I did just that. My letter to him began as follows:

  Dear Mr. Nansen:

  Please forgive me for disturbing you. A few days ago we read an article which pointed out that the most widely read book in Norway was your diary about your three-year incarceration in Sachsenhausen. I was also in Sachsenhausen. My name is Tommy Buergenthal, and I was ten years old at the time. I was in the Revier, where two of my toes were amputated.

  Then I told him about the Norwegian I had met there, that he had been very kind to me and helped me very much, but that I had forgotten his name and address. In the last paragraph of my letter, I reported that I had found my mother after a two-year separation, and continued:

  The name Nansen sounds most familiar to me, and that is why I am writing this letter to you. Could you possibly be that certain person? In case you are not, I would like to ask you to inquire among your circle of friends who that person could have been so that I might thank him.

  Since I did not have the address of the author of the diaries, I simply addressed the letter to “Mr. Odd Nansen, Norway,” and mailed it off.

  Now the wait started. Weeks passed without an answer. In time I forgot all about the letter. Then one day our doorbell rang. When I opened the door, I was greeted by a Norwegian soldier who had arrived in a Norwegian military truck. (At that time, there was a small Norwegian military garrison stationed in the British Zone of Germany.) Pointing to the truck, he said that he had a package to deliver. When I suggested that he give it to me, he said it was too big for me to carry. At that point, two other soldiers jumped off the truck and opened its rear flap. They pulled out a huge wooden crate and carried it into the house, up the stairs, and into our apartment. “This is from Odd Nansen,” one of the soldiers said, as he handed me a letter. The letter began with “Lieber, lieber Tommy!” And it continued:

  You cannot imagine the great happiness your letter produced in me and many, many others.…That is how we learned for the first time that you were alive and had found your mother. Your letter made your many old friends very happy, as well as the many new friends you now have without knowing it.…First, I have to tell you that I am “that certain person” who visited you in the Revier in Sachsenhausen. Moreover, in my diaries, which you already know about, I devote a number of chapters to you and to our conversations in the Revier, where I met you and where I and many of my comrades came to love you and could never forget you. Many thousands of people have now read my diaries, and many of them think they know you because of that book. They have frequently asked me whether I had heard anything about little Tommy, but again and again I had to disappoint them.

  Mr. Nansen then told me of his long and unsuccessful search for me, and his gradual assumption that I had not survived. But my letter changed all that. To know that I was alive and that I had been reunited with my mother was marvelous news for him, his family, and my many old and new friends. He asked me to write right away and to tell him all about myself and my mother and whether I had found my father. He also wanted to know whether we needed anything, particularly food and clothing, and he offered to help us move to Norway, where living conditions at the time were better than in Germany. The letter was signed, “Your ‘Uncle’ Odd (Nansen).”

  Letter from Odd Nansen to Thomas

  As we started to open the wooden crate the soldiers had delivered from Mr. Nansen, I kept chiding Mutti. “I told you his father was not a cookie manufacturer! Nobody believed me that I would find him or that my letter would reach him. See, it reached him even without a proper address,” I kept gloating. The crate was filled with the most marvelous food items: cans of sardines and herring, condensed milk, dried fruit, rice, flour and sugar, a variety of crackers, and many, many chocolate bars and other candy. Mutti and I just stood there in total disbelief. Who had ever seen so much food or even tasted it? At the time, food was still severely rationed in Germany, and even with the food packages we received from the American Joint, we never had enough, nor anything as “exotic” as this shipment. We were in seventh heaven and in the days to come ate more chocolate than was good for us. Later I learned that Norwegian schoolchildren had collected the chocolate and candy for me. They started this campaign after Norwegian newspapers reported that I was alive and living in Göttingen. Because Odd Nansen had dedicated his book to “the living memory” of some of his friends from camp and to “you too, little Tommy!” and had described me in his book as the “Angel Raphael of the Revier,” I had become famous in Norway and something of a hero to the country’s children. In the meantime, the three-volume book arrived with the following inscription:

  Dear Tommy, here is my camp diary. As you will see, it is also dedicated to you. Even though you will not be able to read it in Norwegian, I want you nevertheless to have it as a present from a person who came to love you and one who never forgot nor ever will forget his young friend, that little brave angel from Revier No. III in Sachsenhausen.

  Not long thereafter, Mr. Nansen came to Göttingen and arranged for me to visit him and his family in Norway. It was not all that easy for me to make that trip because I did not have a proper passport. Sometime after Mutti returned to Göttingen, she was offered her German citizenship back. She declined it, telling the official who had come to see her, “You took it away; now you can keep it!” That meant that we did not have a German passport and were only eligible for a stateless one. I eventually got such a passport and a visa for travel to Norway. Mutti and I met Mr. Nansen in Hamburg, from where he and I flew to Oslo. At the airport, Mr. Nansen introduced me to a German he identified as “my good friend, Mr. Willy Brandt, who fought against the Nazis in the Norwegian resistance.” Of course, at the time, I had no idea who Willy Brandt was — I think he was deputy mayor of Berlin when we met. Years later, I would proudly claim that I knew Willy Brandt long before he became famous as West Germany’s chancellor.

  “The Angel Raphael of the Revier,” drawing by Odd Nansen

  My trip to Norway was filled with one adventure after another. For one thing, I had never flown in an airplane before, which in itself was a thrilling experience. It was followed by a press conference at the Oslo airport, where I had to answer hundreds of questions. The Nansen family, including Mrs. Nansen and their four children — Marit, Eigil, Siri, and Odd Erik — treated me like a beloved, long-lost family member. Mr. Nansen also arranged for me to meet many former Sachsenhausen inmates who knew me from the camp, among them — if I remember correctly — a prime minister and other
high government officials and leading personalities. I felt very important, of course, although I most enjoyed being able to swim with the Nansen kids in the Oslofjord, which abutted the Nansen family property. I had never even been near the sea, and the Oslofjord and the surrounding mountains were a very special experience for me. I also went with the Nansen family to their cottage in the mountains. Mr. Nansen was an architect by profession and an excellent painter. His camp diary contained many sketches of inmates and Nazi guards, and his home in Oslo was filled with these and other paintings and drawings. Fun conversations and reminiscences enlivened our dinners. I even learned some Norwegian words because it was decreed that one day a week the dinner language would be Norwegian, and if I wanted to eat, I had to ask for the food in Norwegian. That proved to be a strong incentive to learn the necessary words.

  Thomas with Odd Nansen, 1951

  The trip back to Germany turned out to be most unpleasant. Some American friends of the Nansens were scheduled to travel by train to Copenhagen via Sweden on the same day I was to leave Oslo. The Nansens thought that it would be fun for me to have an opportunity to see Copenhagen, and especially the Tivoli, in the company of these friends as I made my way back to Germany. My plane ticket was traded in for a train ticket, and we were on our way. But I did not get very far. I was stopped at the border between Sweden and Norway. Since I did not have transit visas for Sweden and Denmark, which I needed as a stateless person, I was not allowed to proceed. That meant that I had to return to Oslo, where the Nansens obtained the necessary visas for me. Back in Göttingen, about six weeks later and without ever having stopped to see Copenhagen, I told Mutti what problems I had encountered with my stateless passport. She was quite upset that her stand on principle should now cause added hardship. “To hell with principle,” she said, and a day later applied for the return of our German citizenship.

  When the German translation of Odd Nansen’s book appeared in 1949, he noted in the introduction that he was donating the proceeds of that volume to a fund set up to help German refugees. That made me wonder why a man who had spent more than three years in a Nazi concentration camp would care about the fate of these people. After some time, I began to think that it was important that individuals like Nansen and the rest of us who had been subjected to terrible suffering at the hands of the Germans treat them with humanity, not because we sought their gratitude or wanted to show how generous in spirit we were, but simply because our experience should have taught us to empathize with human beings in need, regardless of who they were. At the same time, of course, I was convinced that those Germans who ordered or committed the crimes the Nazis were responsible for should be punished, not Germans in general simply because they were Germans. That is why I also came to realize that the machine gun I wanted to mount on our balcony when I first arrived in Göttingen was a shameful idea. I concluded that even to contemplate that action reduced me to the level of those Germans who had killed innocent human beings. What is more, it dishonored the memory of those who had died in the camps. As time passed, these early random reflections came to solidify into convictions that influenced my thinking and actions later in life.

  In 1951, shortly before I left Germany for the United States, Odd Nansen delivered a keynote address at an event organized to coincide with the conferral of the German Peace Prize on Albert Schweitzer, the famous humanitarian, by the Association of German Booksellers and Publishers. Mutti and I were invited to both events. The Schweitzer ceremony took place in the historic St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt. I knew, of course, who Schweitzer was and was very moved when Nansen introduced me to him. In his speech, delivered a day earlier, Nansen called on the international community to address the plight of German refugees. At the time, the question of whether Germany should be allowed to participate in the 1952 Olympics was still being debated around the world. In his speech, Nansen urged a favorable decision with the following words: “It is unjust and senseless to punish the children for the sins of their fathers. But that is what is sought to be done when Germany’s young people are kept out of associations [designed to promote] international cooperation.”

  The theme of the conference, with its focus on peace and human dignity, had a profound impact on me in terms of the values to which I have devoted much of my life. I still have a doge-ared copy of Nansen’s speech and a photograph of Schweitzer holding a kitten. Taking in the pomp and ceremony that surrounded us in that church — the first such event I had ever attended — I turned to Mutti, who was with me, and whispered, “Who would ever have thought that we would be allowed into this historic cathedral? Not all that long ago we were Untermenschen [subhumans], and now we are invited guests. If only Papa could be with us on this occasion.” Over the years, I have thought often of my father when attending similar ceremonies in Germany and Austria. He who believed that Hitler and the Nazis would sooner or later be defeated never had the satisfaction, unfortunately, of seeing that he was right and witnessing the transformation of Germany into a democratic state.

  Nansen came to Göttingen before the Frankfurt conference and told Mutti and me that he wanted to write a book about our camp experiences. He had apparently received many letters from the readers of his diary, urging him to tell my story in full. We agreed, of course, to be interviewed by Nansen for the book and spent a few days answering his questions. Although we remained in contact with Nansen in the years that followed, we heard nothing more about the book and assumed that he had decided not to write it. Nineteen years later, in 1970, his book Tommy was published in Norway. * He immediately sent me a copy. The long delay in getting the book out, Nansen explained, was due to the fact that in the intervening years he had been extremely busy in his architecture firm and had to put the book project aside. But, in 1969, he fell ill and was ordered by his doctors to give up his architecture practice. With time on his hands, he went back to his notes from the 1951 interview with Mutti and me and wrote the book. Tommy was published only in Norwegian. Nansen died a couple of years later without getting the book published in any other language. Fortunately, I saw Nansen before he died. While attending a human rights conference in Sweden, I decided to delay my return flight to the United States so I could spend a few days visiting him in Oslo. I did not realize how sick he was and was shocked to find him in such bad health. He refused to talk about his health and kept telling me instead that he was delighted that I was involved in human rights work. Of course, he did not want to hear that he more than anyone else was responsible for my choosing to embark on this career path. I learned only later that he was one of the cofounders of UNICEF. That did not really surprise me. After all, I was one of the beneficiaries of his lifelong commitment to helping children in need.

  It was not until 1985, my final year as dean of American University Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C., that I was finally able to read Tommy. As my office was preparing the program for the last graduation ceremony I was to preside over as dean, I was asked by the president of the Law Students Association to permit him during the ceremony to say a few words on behalf of the graduating class. Of course I agreed, and when the time came, I invited him to take the floor. He walked up to the podium, unwrapped a package in a black binder, and told the audience that it was the English translation of Tommy. Explaining that Tommy was a book about my experiences during the Second World War, he continued, “Dean Buergenthal, the graduating class has commissioned this private English translation of Tommy as a token of our appreciation for you so that you will finally be able to read the book that tells your story.” When I was handed the translation of Tommy, I just stood there, overwhelmed by emotion and unable to say a word. * It took me quite a while before I was able to continue with the prescribed graduation program.

  During the years I spent in Göttingen, Germany underwent dramatic changes, particularly as far as the economic recovery of the country was concerned. The 1948 currency reform, which enabled us to exchange the largely worthless Reichsmarks for the new D-Marks
, made a great impression on me because, almost overnight, empty store windows were filled with products I had never seen before. I think it was during that period that I ate my first orange. As I was eating it, Mutti told me that oranges were full of vitamin C and that, because they were very expensive and still difficult to obtain, they could only be bought when needed to ward off a cold or influenza. It was also about this time that I had my first taste of Coca-Cola. I don’t know from whom or where Mutti obtained the bottle. Mutti showed it to me and told me that she had heard that it was a very special drink that quenched one’s thirst with only a few sips and that I should drink it only when I was particularly thirsty. She then put the bottle into the cupboard — we did not have refrigerators in those days — and there it sat until I came home one day, terribly thirsty from hours of playing soccer. Mutti agreed that the time had come to open the Coke bottle. The more I drank that sweet, lukewarm drink, the thirstier I got. For years afterward, I only had to look at a bottle of Coca-Cola to be reminded of the unpleasant taste of my first sip.