A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Thomas Buergenthal (review)

Thomas Buergenthal's poignant memoir of survival allows us to understand the Holocaust as he experienced it—from a child's point of view. He takes us on his journey from the Kielce ghetto to the Auschwitz concentration camp, through the subsequent death march that led him to Sachsenhausen, and then on to his liberation by the Soviets. Like most Holocaust memoirs, Buergenthal's narrative is structured chronologically—he describes his early childhood recollections of life pre-Holocaust, provides moving accounts of survival as he endured a Nazi concentration camp, and then reflects on the life he made for himself thereafter. And it is through Buergenthal's attention to his vibrant professional and personal life in the wake of this atrocity that A Lucky Child fills a crucial gap in Holocaust scholarship, giving us a fuller picture of survival in the aftermath of genocide. These postliberation experiences lend new insight to the scholarship on Holocaust studies and help to demonstrate the ways in which the legacy of the Holocaust permeates the life of a survivor.

Buergenthal penned his memoir more than sixty years after the end of the Second World War, and he did so for both personal and public reasons: He wanted to create a more complete and permanent familial legacy that dinner snippets alone could not provide, and he firmly believed that when the individuals who survived this trauma lift their voices, express their memories, our understanding of the Holocaust is enriched. While Buergenthal attributes some of the delay in writing his memoir to the demands of life in general and the need to focus on his education alongside his professional and familial responsibilities, he also felt that writing so long after his experiences enabled him both to be detached from the Holocaust and to recollect and reflect with greater clarity on the impact that the Holocaust has had on the person he became. Taking such an approach runs the risk of blurring the distinction between Buergenthal's child and adult selves, but despite the passage of time and the vantage point of his senior years, Buergenthal still presents us with a compelling account of his life experiences through the eyes of a child rather than simply a detached witness to events that are compounded with hindsight and reflection. So we are able to empathize with young Tommy, a boy who lives and sees the Holocaust, an event that makes the world around him collapse. And it is this point of view that serves Holocaust scholars well, precisely because Buergenthal captures his history of the Holocaust from the perspective of an innocent child whose recollections, while not complete, give us a seemingly unfiltered view into life and survival in and after a Nazi concentration camp.

Buergenthal's earliest memories are of his brief time living in Lubochna, Czechoslovakia, where his parents owned a hotel; he acknowledges that his memories of this period are a combination of what he actually remembers and what his parents told him. Because his is a memoir of place rather than time, Buergenthal is less compelled to get the dates exact than he is to convey his impressions of Lubochna as a young boy. Uncertain of the exact year his family had to flee his home, Buergenthal nonetheless gives us a glimpse of a child's sense of loss when he speaks about his one unforgotten memory, that of having to leave behind his beloved toy red car. Although he was unable to contemplate the gravity of his familial situation at the time, we intuitively understand and can even empathize with his concern over the loss of such an item. When Buergenthal talks of play early in his memoir it serves to remind us that there is a universality to childhood that the Nazis erased: as the Nazi regime swept across Europe, young Tommy was able to experience some moments filled with childhood innocence while...