Jurist, prudent: A Holocaust survivor speaks. Part 2

April 18, 10:40 PMDC Publishing Industry ExaminerWendy Coakley-Thompson

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Thomas Buergenthal talks about A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

Thomas Buergenthal's A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy, previously published in Germany in 2007 as Ein Glückskind (Lucky Child), has sold over 100,000 copies so far, has been published in ten different languages, and is now in print in twelve countries. The feat is amazing, considering that publishers in both the United States and the United Kingdom had initially rejected the book, stating, “Holocaust books don’t sell.” So Germany, the country that had previously taken away Buergenthal's citizenship and had slaughtered six million Jews, enthusiastically embraced both the book and the author.

Though Buergenthal works in The Hague, he calls the Washington DC area home. He has lived in the area for more than 30 years. He first came here as an undergraduate student attending Bethany College in West Virginia. Bethany selected him to participate in the Washington Semester Program from 1955 to 1956. He would eventually become the Dean of American University Washington College of Law. He also taught at George Washington University Law School for 12 years.

Buergenthal says he is eager to see how American crowds will receive him. In Germany, he toured all the major cities, doing television appearances and presiding over readings to mixed crowds of both older people and younger people in their thirties who questioned how their grandparents could have actively or passively participated in the Holocaust. His tour of the United Kingdom, primarily in London and Bath, consisted of moderator hosted Q&A, book fairs, and radio interviews. In Spain, he also did an inordinate amount of newspaper, television, and radio interviews.

Buergenthal wonders what types of questions his American audiences will ask him. The questions he has been asked so far have depended on the country in which he found himself. That aside, he is always amazed at the many ways people interpret A Lucky Child. “You think you’ve written it one way, and people interpret it another way,” he laughs.

During his tour of Germany, people asked, ‘Do you hate to speak German?’ “They assume that German is the language of the German nation. German isn’t the nation; it’s my mother tongue,” Buergenthal explains. It is the language he used to speak to his beloved mother, Gerda, called Mutti.

In England, people asked, ‘How hard was it for you to write this book?’ “It wasn’t hard at all,” Buergenthal answers. The story has been with him for over fifty years. Buergenthal insists that writing his story was definitely easier than writing his law books, most notably International Protection of Human Rights, published in 1973. In those, he says with a chuckle, “I had to write footnotes!”

Spanish audiences were much more interested in details, commonly asking Buergenthal ‘What was it like to be a child?’ Buergenthal speculates that the origin of the Spaniards’ curiosity stemmed from attempts to fill a vacuum of knowledge concerning the civil war in Spain, about which there were no books of his kind.

After Washington DC, Buergenthal heads for New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami and Houston. The most monumental red-letter date inked on his calendar is his granddaughter’s Bat Mitzvah. His grandchildren are his joy.

Perhaps as they read A Lucky Child, they are able to appreciate the overwhelming odds that their grandfather had surmounted to ensure their existence.