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

by Thomas Buergenthal
Hennepin County Library hardcover 225 pages
genre: Non-fiction memoir

I am so glad that Buergenthal wrote this book, and I am incredibly grateful to the neighbor who kept the suitcase of photographs that his parents gave them (even though they were worried about getting caught by the Nazis). This was a fairly unemotional account of his childhood experiences, which surprised me. How does one relate such harrowing times without a strong outpouring of emotion? I disagree with the publishers who said there was "no market" for Holocaust books. These personal narratives are powerful and soon the first-hand storytellers will be gone.

page 70 - when talking about the Jewish prisoners who worked with the Nazis to avoid even worse treatment, "Had they not ended up in the camps, they probably would have remained decent human beings. What is it in the human character that gives some individuals the moral strength not to sacrifice their decency and dignity, regardless of the costs to themselves, whereas others become murderously ruthless in the hope of ensuring their own survival?"

page 85 - many years later, he reflected on food and the difference between his children and his own childhood. "Years later, when my own children would have to be coaxed to drink their milk, I would think of that milk in the SS kitchen and be grateful that they never had to risk their lives to get it. At the same time, I would have to hide my anger that they did not appreciate what it meant to have milk in abundance. But how could they? For many of us who survived the camps, food took on an almost mystical quality."

page 95 - on civilians who were evil toward Jews and Nazi guards who were surprisingly sympathetic - ". . . I have never been able to reconcile these two events to my own satisfaction, other than to end up with the trite conclusion that generalizations about the Holocaust, about German guilt, or about what Germans knew or did not know do not help us understand the forces that produced one of the world's greatest tragedies. Nor do they help explain what it is in our nature that enables human beings to plan and commit the genocides and the many other mass murders to which mankind has been subjected during my lifetime."

page 107 - ". . . I was in yet another camp. That explains why I was not particularly excited about all this talk of our impending liberation. . . . I could never quite believe that there would actually come a time when the war would be over and I would be free and able to go to school."

page 171 - As an educator, this jumped out at me! He came to America as a 17-year-old in 1951, to live with his aunt and uncle and go to school. "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." And this was in the 1950s! Wow.

Overall, an important first-person account of a Jewish childhood in Nazi Germany. The least compelling part (to me) was about his adult career as a lawyer for international human rights. The specific details (like his first experience with Coca-Cola and his connection to Odd Nansen) were my favorite parts.