Thomas Buergenthal: Holocaust Survivor to Human Rights Advocate

I. Introduction

Thomas Buergenthal, himself a victim of serious human rights abuses as a child, has over the years established himself as a world leader in promoting international human rights law. One of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, Buergenthal spent four of the first ten years of his life in Nazi concentration camps. The horrors he experienced in his youth have no doubt had much to do with his professional activities, which have propelled him into becoming an internationally acclaimed human rights advocate.

After the war, Buergenthal immigrated to the United States, where he went to college and law school, earning, among other degrees, a doctorate in international legal studies from the Harvard Law School. He became a law professor, specializing in international law and international human rights. Without ever giving up a full-time academic career, Buergenthal has at different times during the past three decades served as judge and as President of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, as one of three Commissioners on the UN Truth Commission for El Salvador, and as the first US citizen to be elected to the UN Human Rights Committee. He has represented the United States at various diplomatic conferences within the framework of UNESCO and the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, and was the founder and first President of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights in Costa Rica. Through his scholarship, judicial and diplomatic activities as well as the force of his personality and commitment, he has made lasting contributions to the cause of human rights. In his quiet yet highly effective way, he has been able to influence the thinking of numerous students, scholars, policymakers and government officials around the world and draw them into the struggle for human rights.

II. Personal Background

Tom Buergenthal was born in Czechoslovakia in 1934, to Mundek and Gerda Bürgenthal. His parents had moved there from Germany when the Nazis came to power. ¹ His father had bought a small hotel in the Tatra mountains with a friend, a well-known political cartoonist whose devastating cartoons of Hitler and his lieutenants forced him to flee Germany. They acquired the hotel in the belief that Hitler would last only a few years and wanted it to serve as a temporary refuge and gathering place for opponents of the Nazis.

When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939, Tom and his parents fled across the border into Poland. Although his father had a political visa to enter England, war broke out in Poland before they could escape. Eventually the family ended up in the Ghetto of Kielce in Poland. In 1942, most of the inmates of the Kielce Ghetto were sent to the extermination camp of Treblinka. Less than two thousand people, out of a population of 20,000, escaped that fate. ² Tom and his parents survived the liquidation of the Ghetto and ended up in a special work camp, also in Kielce. A year later that camp too was dissolved. Of the thirty or so children who had survived up to then, all but three were torn from their parents and driven to the Jewish cemetery where they were killed with hand grenades. ³ Tom, who was then only nine years old, went up to the Nazi camp commander and told him in perfect German that he could work. Taken aback, the officer looked at him with a smile and said “We’ll see,” and Tom was allowed to live. ⁴

In 1944, the Buergenthal family was shipped to Auschwitz. As Buergenthal explains it, he was “lucky” to get into Auschwitz, because children were usually “selected out,” meaning that they were sent to the gas chamber on entering the camp. However, because Tom and his parents arrived directly from a work camp with five hundred others, the Nazis assumed that everyone was a worker and so didn’t check the group. When the Nazis tattooed him, his father said, “You are safe. They wouldn’t waste ink on you if you...