When it comes to the Holocaust, Thomas Buergenthal has a mission: to “denumerize” it.
“It’s always the 6 million,” the Czech-born Jewish American said. “It doesn’t mean anything. Here at least you can see what the Holocaust meant to one small family.”
By “here,” Buergenthal means his memoir, “A Lucky Child,” which recounts his harrowing childhood fleeing the Nazis and then surviving hellholes like Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz. He appeared April 22 at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club to speak about his experience.
For most of his 75 years, Buergenthal has been a law professor and judge. He serves on the International Court of Justice in The Hague, dividing his time between the Netherlands and his Washington, D.C., home. He is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on human rights law.
As a child, he experienced the ultimate violation of human rights.
Despite the horror, Buergen-thal sees himself as lucky. Time and time again, he averted death in the camps. Both he and his mother survived, though his father perished days before liberation.
For Buergenthal, luck was not “the residue of design” (as Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey once put it). Luck for him was pure chance. He and his mother could have died a thousand different times during the war, if not for random factors.
Like being sent straight to Auschwitz rather than Birkenau, the next-door death factory, which would have meant certain liquidation.
Or the time his mother, Gerda Buergenthal, stood in line at the Auschwitz selection (turn left, you lived; turn right and you went to the gas chambers). The notorious Dr. Josef Mengele noticed she had a thyroid condition.
“She looked him in the eye,” Buergenthal recalled, “and said to him in perfect German, ‘You’re a master diagnostician, doctor.’ He spared her.”
During an interview while he was in San Francisco on a book tour, Buergenthal disclosed that he did minimal research for his memoir, preferring to rely on memory. Thus he tells his survivor’s tale through the eyes of a child.
“For me, the only way to tell the story was as I experienced it,” he said. “This story was in me from the beginning, as the story of a child.”
The son of a Polish hotelier father and German mother, Buergenthal’s first 10 years were happy. Once the war started, he and his family nearly escaped Europe for England, but the Germans bombed the rail lines.
The family went intact from ghetto to Nazi work camp. Buergenthal always managed to find little jobs — like parking bicycles — that elicited more adult protection. Even in the death camps, when he was on his own, he found work in or near a kitchen, eking out extra food. “Kids are resourceful when they need to be,” he said.
With the Allies closing in, the S.S. forced the inmates of his camp on a death march in the dead of winter. During a transport on a train, Buergenthal says he would have starved had Czech citizens not thrown loaves of bread into his open cattle car.
After the war, he found shelter serving as a mascot with a Polish army unit. He ended up in a Polish orphanage for Jewish children, and it took nearly two years for his mother to find him. But their luck held out, and the two were reunited. In 1951 he moved to the United States.
The Holocaust influenced Buergenthal’s choice of career. He has served on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the U.N. Human Rights Committee, and also sat on the board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which spearheaded the museum in Washington, D.C.
In his role on the International Court of Justice, Buergenthal cast a dissenting vote when the issue of Israel’s security barrier came up in 2004. The court ruled that Israel violated international law in the routing of the wall.
“I was the sole dissenter,” he said, “not necessarily because I am a Jew. It was what I feel I had to do. We didn’t get enough information on which parts of the wall were important for self-defense. For the court to say the entire wall is illegal is a big jump.”
Today he admires and adheres to Jewish ethics. A few weeks ago he attended the bat mitzvah of a granddaughter in Baltimore, which he notes with pride was the first such religious ceremony in his family since before the Holocaust.
Still, the judge admits he does not believe in “a personal God,” adding, “It would be hard for me, after what I’ve seen.”
“A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy” by Thomas Buergenthal (256 pages, Little, Brown and Co., $24.99)