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

by Thomas Buergenthal

  There was always great joy in our offices in Zurich when we were able to connect the account of a Holocaust victim to an heir, but there were also moments of sadness when we learned that an heir had died before we had been able to make a finding of entitlement. Many heirs of account holders were never found. A case I cannot forget concerned an account claimed by a man and a woman in their seventies, living in different countries, who each contended that they were the sole heir of the account holder. After reviewing the case file, one of our young lawyers came to see me. He reported that the two claimants appeared to be siblings and that each believed that the other had perished in the Holocaust. I examined the file and agreed with him. The entire office was alerted, and there was rejoicing all around: we had not only found the heirs to an account but would also be able to reunite a brother and sister! Because of the advanced age of the heirs, we decided that the good news should be conveyed to them very carefully and that the brother should be contacted first. When I saw the face of the young lawyer shortly after he had made the call, I could guess what had happened: the brother had died three months earlier without ever learning that his sister was alive.

  As chairman of the Committee on Conscience of the Washington-based U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, it was my task to relate the experience of the Holocaust to contemporary realities by warning against new genocides and crimes against humanity. By the end of the mid-1990s, our optimistic assumptions that the world had seen the end of these crimes were belied by what was happening in Rwanda and in the Balkans. Before we had a chance to speak out and get the international community to act, hundreds of thousands of human beings had died. That was a familiar story to those of us who had survived the Holocaust. Although we worked very hard to get the international community to take action, that action often came too late, if at all, which only went to prove that we are still far from the day when “Never again!” really means what it is supposed to mean.

  Over the years, contemporary events have triggered images in my mind of my camp experiences. During the Balkan conflict in the 1990s, for example, it was a common occurrence for TV stations to broadcast pictures of columns of exhausted refugees fleeing from combat zones. As I watched these scenes, I recognized myself in the frightened faces of the children. The pictures brought back memories of approaching German tanks on those Polish country roads, where our little group of refugees huddled in fear. When listening to the sole survivor of the El Mozote massacre, I was transported back to the liquidation of the Ghetto of Kielce and the shooting and screams that engulfed us as the sick and infirm were being murdered. At another point in El Salvador, while inspecting the courtyard of the residence where the Jesuit priests had been executed, I was told that the view of a distant observation tower that was relevant to my investigation was obscured by rosebushes planted in memory of the priests. As I tried to look through the rosebushes, they gave way in my mind to the images of the beautiful wildflowers I had seen a year earlier on a visit to Auschwitz. The flowers covered the once barren ground of the camp as if to hide the horrendous crimes that had been committed there, just as the roses in that Salvadoran courtyard seemed intent on covering up the murders of the innocent priests. A few years earlier in San José, Costa Rica, I had a somewhat similar experience while hearing the testimony being presented to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights about the torture and killings that had been committed in Honduras in connection with forced disappearances. As I listened to the witness, I found myself remembering the brutal beating of Spiegel in that barrack in Auschwitz, the killing of the young Poles who had been caught looting during the liquidation of the Ghetto of Kielce, and the beating and subsequent hanging of the prisoners who had tried to escape from the Henryków work camp.

  These and similar experiences have frequently accompanied me in my human rights activities. They have forced me to reflect on what it is that allows or compels human beings to commit such cruel and brutal crimes. It frightens me terribly that the individuals committing these acts are for the most part not sadists, but ordinary people who go home in the evening to their families, washing their hands before sitting down to dinner, as if what they had been doing was just a job like any other. If we humans can so easily wash the blood of our fellow humans off our hands, then what hope is there for sparing future generations from a repeat of the genocides and mass killings of the past? Was the Holocaust merely a practice run for the next set of genocides of other groups of human beings? Of course, I am very troubled by these questions, especially when I hear of new atrocities being committed in one part of the world or another.

  These reflections might turn me into a cynic or have the effect of making me give up on my human rights work. But they do not have that effect. While I do not believe that I survived the Holocaust in order to devote my life to the protection of human rights, I believe that, having survived, I have an obligation to try to do all I can to spare others, wherever they might be, from suffering a fate similar to that of the victims of the Holocaust. It should therefore not be a surprise to anyone that the terrible crimes and cruelties experienced by human beings in many parts of the world since the Holocaust do not weaken my commitment to human rights. Instead, they reinforce my belief in the need to work ever harder to promote human rights education on all levels and to strengthen international and national legal and political institutions capable of making it ever more difficult for governments to violate human rights.

  I also consider it a mistake to assume, as some do, that no significant progress has been made since the Holocaust in protecting human rights. The large body of international human rights laws in existence today and the many institutions established to enforce them, while they have certainly not put an end to all genocides or crimes against humanity, have tended to prevent or reduce large-scale human rights violations in many parts of the world. Here I think, for example, of the end of Apartheid and the emergence of democratic regimes in Latin America and elsewhere. The demise of the Soviet Union with its gulags is, in part at least, attributable to massive international efforts to put an end to that repressive regime. And who would have dared to dream in the 1970s or 1980s that eastern Europe would now be part of a democratic Europe? Admittedly, much still remains to be done, but the fact that some progress, however slow, is being made suggests to me that to give up hope now on efforts to improve the human rights situation around the world would only increase the suffering of an ever greater number of human beings and leave them without any prospect for a better future.

  I tend to believe that had our contemporary international human rights mechanisms and norms existed in the 1930s, they might well have saved many of the lives that were lost in the Holocaust. The vast numbers of United Nations and regional human rights treaties, declarations, and institutions have created an international climate that expects governments to protect human rights and has made it increasingly more difficult for them to defend policies that result in serious violations of human rights. These laws and institutions have in turn contributed to the growth of nongovernmental human rights organizations that alert the international community to serious human rights violations almost as soon as they occur. Some democratic governments have over the years also developed national policies and practices that promote human rights on the international level. All these efforts have been helped by the contemporary communications revolution, which permits news of human rights abuses and unattended natural catastrophes to be broadcast around the world in almost real time. Mankind’s yearning for human rights and human dignity has benefited from political and technological developments that gradually rob offending governments of the legitimacy and support they need to persist in violating human rights over the long term. That we can point to this or that government impervious to these developments proves no more than that progress is slow; it is equally true, though, that the number of such governments is decreasing, if only because in today’s world these governments frequently pay a heavy political and economic price for engagin
g in practices unacceptable to large segments of the international community.

  None of the international human rights norms, mechanisms, or policies to which I have referred here existed in the 1930s. The international law of that period allowed governments almost unlimited freedom to mistreat their own citizens. Nonintervention in the internal affairs of a state was the norm. It not only protected offending governments against international pressure but also provided other governments with an excuse for their inaction. Hardly any international nongovernmental human rights organizations existed at the time, and the world’s media were neither equipped nor interested in stigmatizing violations of human rights. Today it is therefore easier than it was in the 1930s to arouse the international community to act. That does not mean that such action will always be forthcoming. But it does mean that we now have better tools than we had in the past to stop massive violations of human rights. The task ahead is to strengthen these tools, not to despair, and to never believe that mankind is incapable of creating a world in which our grandchildren and their descendants can live in peace and enjoy the human rights that were denied to so many of my generation.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS BOOK does not have the usual publishing history. I wrote it in English, but it was first published in more than half a dozen other languages. While this is not a unique situation, it is rather rare unless political, religious, or other reasons bar the publication of an author’s books in his native country or language. That was certainly not true in my case. My problem, as I learned on more than one occasion from publishers in the United States and in the United Kingdom, was that “Holocaust books don’t sell.” It is therefore ironic that this book was first published in Germany in 2007 and that it remained on that country’s bestseller list for quite a number of weeks.

  It troubles me that some publishers in the English-speaking world assume that there is nothing more to be said about one of mankind’s greatest human tragedies that their readers will want to read. If this assumption were to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, “Never again!” will lapse into a slogan devoid of the meaning it is designed to convey. We cannot hope to prevent future genocides and crimes against humanity unless we seek to understand the truth about, and the causes of, the Holocaust. Important insights about these questions can be gained not only from scholarly works but also from the memoirs of those who lived through it. I am therefore most grateful to the publishers of this book, Profile Books in the United Kingdom and Little, Brown and Company in the United States, for making my memoir available to the English-language reader.

  My very special thanks and appreciation go to Andrew Franklin of Profile Books and to Tracy Behar of Little, Brown, for deciding to publish the book and for their insightful editorial suggestions. I also wish to express my admiration to Penny Daniel of Profile Books for so competently and pleasantly coordinating the publication effort between different parts of the world.

  My agent, Eva Koralnik, of the Liepman Literary Agency in Zurich, Switzerland, deserves my appreciation for believing that my story should be published and for promoting its publication with enthusiasm and personal commitment.

  At all stages of the writing of this book, I had the indispensable assistance of my secretary, Mrs. Danielle Touffet-Okandeji. I am profoundly grateful to her for the intelligence, professional skill, and, above all, helpful spirit with which she assisted me throughout the many drafts of this book.

  My wife, Peggy Buergenthal, has lived through each page of this book and its many revisions. She has been my most severe editor and critic. As a result, she has enabled me to write a book that benefited immensely from her loving support, deep understanding, and creative editorial suggestions. In so many ways, this is therefore as much her book as it is mine.

  About the Author

  THOMAS BUERGENTHAL has dedicated his life to international law and the protection of human rights. He has combined a career as a professor of international law with judicial and investigatory activities devoted to the international protection of human rights and the rule of law.

  On his election in 2000 as the American judge of the International Court of Justice at The Hague, Thomas Buergenthal retired from an active academic career that began in 1962 at the Law School of the State University of New York at Buffalo and ended with his tenure as Lobingier Professor of Comparative Law and Jurisprudence at the George Washington University Law School. Before joining the George Washington faculty, Buergenthal had served as dean of the American University Washington College of Law, Fulbright and Jaworski Professor of Law at the University of Texas, and I. T. Cohen Professor of Human Rights at Emory University School of Law, where he also directed the Human Rights Program of the Carter Center.

  Buergenthal served as judge and president of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as well as a member of the U.N. Human Rights Committee and the U.N. Truth Commission for El Salvador. He was chairman of the Committee on Conscience of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council and vice chairman of the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland.

  Buergenthal graduated from Bethany College, West Virginia, and New York University School of Law. He earned Master of Laws and Doctor of Juridical Science degrees from Harvard Law School.

  Corecipient of the 2008 Gruber Foundation International Justice Prize, he and his wife, Peggy, live in The Hague, Netherlands.

  * Unlike American high schools, German students in my day were admitted to high school after four years of primary school and a qualifying examination. They then spent nine years in high school. (back to text)

  * Odd Nansen’s three-volume diaries, Fra Dag til Dag, were fi rst published in Norway in 1947. English-language abridged versions of this book were also published in the United States (From Day to Day) and in Great Britain (Day after Day) in 1949. A much shorter German translation of the book (Von Tag zu Tag) was also published in 1949. (back to text)

  * Tommy: En sannferdig fortelling fortalt av Odd Nansen, published in Oslo by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1970. (back to text)

  * No English translation of Tommy was ever published. (back to text)