During the roundup Mundek marched up to the commandant holding little Tommy's hand when young Thomas blurted out "Herr Hauptmann, ich kann arbeiten" – "Captain, I can work", and the skeptical commandant replied "That we shall soon see", and young Thomas was saved from certain death a second time. During the ultimate liquidation of the Arbeitslager, children were torn from their mothers and murdered in gruesome fashion in the Jewish cemetery of Kielce. The surviving residents of the ghetto ended up in the Arbeitslager or work camp, in a small portion of the original ghetto. This was young Thomas' first brush with death. In an early morning in August 1942, when the liquidation of the Kielce ghetto began, Thomas' father bluffed his way out of the ghetto, Werkstatt papers in hand, with his family and a handful of workers in tow, to avoid immediate deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp. Subsequently, Tommy's father was put in charge of the Werkstatt, or ghetto factory, just outside the ghetto walls. The irony of his investment banker father working as an assistant cook was lost on the young Thomas. Initially in the Kielce Ghetto, Mundek worked as a cook's helper. "Yes, the walls have ears", Buergenthal senior would often say. There were also informants ready to denounce other ghetto residents to the Germans for any kind of edge for themselves. Life in the ghetto was difficult because of both the shortage of food and the increasing paranoia brought on by random German razzias, or raids. When the ghetto of Kielce was established by order of the Schutzpolizei, the Buergenthals did not have to move since their one-room apartment (they were now nearly destitute) was located in the area which became designated as the ghetto of Kielce. When Germany invaded Poland, the family sought refuge in Kielce, Poland, a city with a large Jewish population (then 25,000). In 1938 or early 1939, the Buergenthal's hotel was confiscated by the Hlinka Guard, a Slovak fascist party, and the family eventually moved to Katowice, Poland. Thomas's parents were engaged within three days of meeting at the German-Czech border and Thomas was born eleven months later. There he met Gerda Silbergleit, Thomas' future mother, a 20-year-old German Jewish young woman on vacation from Göttingen. However, the rise of Hitler and growing violence against Jews caused Buergenthal senior to leave Germany for Ľubochňa in Czechoslovakia where he owned and managed a resort hotel. He moved to Berlin, where he worked for a private Jewish bank, eventually managing the bank's investment portfolio. Thomas' father Mundek was born in Galicia (Eastern Europe), a region of Poland that belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War and received his education in German and Polish. It was finally published in the US in 2009. Ellen Keohane reported that when Thomas Buergenthal first sought an English-language publisher for this book, he was told, "Holocaust books don't sell." The book first came out in Germany in 2007 and became a bestseller there.
A Lucky Child has been translated into more than a dozen languages and features a Foreword by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. Buergenthal was a judge on the International Court of Justice at The Hague and is regarded as a specialist in international and human rights law. Thomas Buergenthal was born on May 11, 1934, in Ľubochňa, Czechoslovakia to Jewish parents of German and Polish extraction.
QUOTES FROM IDA FINK HOW TO
Author Buergenthal's father, in response to the prophecy commented that "The only thing that fortune-teller knows that we don't know is how to make money in these bad times." Background The book's title refers to the author's mother, Mutti, who while consulting a fortune-teller in Katowice, Poland was told that her child was "ein Glückskind" – a lucky child – an accurate prophecy in light of future events. The book chronicles the author's life in Czechoslovakia and escape from a concentration camp.
A Lucky Child (2007) is a memoir written by Thomas Buergenthal, in the vein of Night by Elie Wiesel or My Brother's Voice (2003) by Stephen Nasser, in which he recounts the astounding story of his surviving the Holocaust as a ten-year-old child owing to his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck.
0 kommentar(er)
