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A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy
Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir A Lucky Child. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life.
Now dedicated to helping those subjected to tyranny throughout the world, Buergenthal writes his story with a simple clarity that highlights the stark details of unimaginable hardship. A Lucky Child is a book that demands to be read by all.
1103271046
A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy
Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir A Lucky Child. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life.
Now dedicated to helping those subjected to tyranny throughout the world, Buergenthal writes his story with a simple clarity that highlights the stark details of unimaginable hardship. A Lucky Child is a book that demands to be read by all.
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A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy
Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir A Lucky Child. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life.
Now dedicated to helping those subjected to tyranny throughout the world, Buergenthal writes his story with a simple clarity that highlights the stark details of unimaginable hardship. A Lucky Child is a book that demands to be read by all.
Considered one of the world's leading international human rights law experts, Thomas Buergenthal served as a judge at the International Court of Justice and prior thereto as judge and president of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. He is the Lobingier Professor of Comparative Law & Jurisprudence at the George Washington University Law School, and the recipient of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's 2015 Elie Wiesel Award.
Read an Excerpt
One day my mother came home in a very excited state. She told my father that she and a girlfriend had gone to a famous fortune-teller. Before going in, Mutti had taken off her wedding ring, and because she looked much younger than her age, she was very surprised when the fortune-teller, after studying her cards, proclaimed that my mother was married and had one child. In addition to knowing a great deal about our family background, the fortune-teller told my mother that her son was "ein Glückskind" - a lucky child - and that he would emerge unscathed from the future that awaited us.
-from the book
Table of Contents
Foreword Elie Wiesel xi
Preface xv
Chapter 1 From Lubochna to Poland 3
Chapter 2 Katowice 26
Chapter 3 The Ghetto of Kielce 38
Chapter 4 Auschwitz 64
Chapter 5 The Auschwitz Death Transport 87
Chapter 6 Liberation 98
Chapter 7 Into the Polish Army 115
Chapter 8 Waiting to Be Found 131
Chapter 9 A New Beginning 150
Chapter 10 Life in Germany 161
Chapter 11 To America 193
Epilogue 207
Acknowledgments 227
Reading Group Guide 231
What People are Saying About This
Cynthia Ozick
"In the plainest words and the steadiest tones (as an intimate would speak deadly truth in the dead of night), Thomas Buergenthal delivers to us the child he once was: an unblemished little boy made human prey by Europe's indelible twentieth-century barbarism, a criminality that will never leave off its telling. History and memory fail to ebb; rather, they accelerate and proliferate, and Buergenthal's voice is now more thunderous than ever. Pledged to universal human rights, he has turned a life of gratuitous deliverance into a work of visionary compassion."--(Cynthia Ozick, author of Heir to the Glimmering World)
Kate Braestrup
"The unsentimental tone of Buergenthal's writing magnifies his deliberate decision not to make melodrama out of a story that is plenty dramatic enough. Like Primo Levi and Anne Frank, Buergenthal can only tell the story of one life, but through that life we are led to consider and honor all the lives of those who weren't so lucky."--(Kate Braestrup, author of Here If You Need Me)
Elizabeth McCracken
"A Lucky Child is an extraordinary story, simply and beautifully told. Heartbreaking and thrilling, it examines what it means to be human, in every good and awful sense. Perhaps most amazingly of all, Thomas Buergenthal remembers and renders the small mysteries and grand passions of childhood, even a childhood lived under the most horrific circumstances."--(Elizabeth McCracken, author of An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination)