A Moving Childhood Memoir

A couple of Saturdays ago - you know, one of those days when it was too hot to breathe outside, let alone do yard work - I sat down with a pre-publication copy of a book that had been sitting on my table for a long time. I only stopped to fix a sandwich for lunch, and by the time I'd finished the book, it was getting dark outside. Sometimes a book grabs you and won't let you go until you reach the end, and that was my experience with Thomas Buergenthal's tale of growing up under the Nazi regime, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy.

At first glance, it's hard to allow that the words "lucky" and "Auschwitz" belong in the same sentence. Buergenthal and his parents found themselves imprisoned first in a Polish ghetto, then a work camp, and finally Auschwitz. Through a series of what can only be described as luck, however, the family wasn't separated until they arrived at the death camp, and even then Thomas and his father managed to stay together for several months. Thomas evaded at least two "selections," times when all the other children around him were removed from their parents and killed. He encountered fellow prisoners who helped him survive, and when the war was over he was reunited with the last surviving member of his family.

It's no wonder that his life experiences led the author to work in the field of international human rights; he now serves as a judge at the International Court of Justice in den Haag. The book carries a forward by Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, a fellow Auschwitz survivor, and those who are familiar with Wiesel's Night may also find this a worthwhile read. I'd certainly recommend it for high-school students, who are still close enough to their own childhoods to identify at least with the narrator, even though they've not been exposed to the horrors he saw as a young child. It would also make for a terrific book club selection. Stop by the library and check it out for yourself.

--Nora