Powerful story of a boy’s will to survive

Odds of survival for adults in Auschwitz were dismal. They were even worse for children, particularly preteens and younger. Generally, a “selection” took place upon arrival at the concentration camp, where the young, elderly and invalids were separated and immediately sent to the gas chambers.

This is the fate that blond-haired, 10-year-old Thomas Buergenthal could have expected when he stepped off a stiflingly crowded cattle car on a sunny day in August 1944 at Birkenau, part of the sprawling Auschwitz complex in occupied Poland.

But by some stroke of luck, there was no selection for his transport and the only separation was the women from the men, who were then marched off for processing, tattooing and barracks assignments. Though he lost contact with his mother, he was able to stay with his father at least for several months.

Buergenthal recounts these events in his new book, “A Lucky Child.” It is a remarkable, sometimes astonishing story of finding protection and kindness from unlikely sources, uncanny narrow escapes and a powerfully strong will to live.

Buergenthal, 74, a judge on the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, tells his story as he remembers living it, not from an adult perspective 60 years later. On the run with his family —- first escaping with his parents from his native Czechoslovakia and later enduring a ghetto and two labor camps before arriving at Auschwitz —- Buergenthal had almost no formal schooling. But he was fluent in German and Polish and was able to act as interpreter. He quickly developed an ability to live by his wits.

One freezing morning in January 1945, the order came to evacuate Birkenau. Clad in thread-bare striped clothing and clutching their few possessions, thousands of inmates (Buergenthal’s term) embarked on a three-day death march to an empty labor camp in Gliwice, Poland, where they stayed for several days. Next they were packed into roofless rail cars for the slow-moving journey through Czechoslovakia en route to Germany. Almost miraculously, loaves of bread began raining down on the inmates from people standing on bridges above. “The bread probably saved my life and that of many others,” Buergenthal writes.

The march and the chilling 10-day train trip to Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin, left Buergenthal with badly frostbitten feet. Reluctant to go to the infirmary because he knew that was usually the express lane to the gas chamber, Buergenthal finally submitted to treatment, including having two of his toes amputated.

While recuperating, a man named Odd Nansen, who had been deported by the Gestapo for his work with the resistance in his native Norway, befriended Buergenthal. Nansen shared some of the food with the boy and used tobacco to bribe the guards to keep the youngster’s name off the list of those to be exterminated. (Nansen, a co-founder of UNICEF, kept a diary of his time in Sachsenhausen that was published in 1947 in which Buergenthal is prominently mentioned, and he also wrote a book about the boy called “Tommy.”)

There is little bitterness and no self-pity as Buergenthal writes of the hardships he faced and the brutality and death that he witnessed. Some aspects, like the unrelenting hunger and cold, he says he was able to banish from his memory.

And unexpectedly, he says, he experienced some very funny and touching moments after the Soviet Army liberated Sachsenhausen. He became the mascot of a Polish unit, who outfitted him in custom-made shoes and uniform and he drove his own cart and pony “liberated” from the remains of a German circus.

Buergenthal spent about a year in an orphanage before his mother located him. It was only then that the 12-year-old learned that his father died in Flossenburg, another German camp. Buergenthal immigrated to the United States in 1951 and has gone on to have a distinguished legal career. He is a former I.T. Cohen Professor of Human Rights at Emory University School of Law and the former director of the human rights program at the Carter Center (1985-89).

Though he says he is not troubled with “survivor’s guilt,” his war experiences nonetheless deeply affected his life path and his efforts to ensure human dignity. He writes: “… One cannot hope to protect mankind from crimes such as those that were visited upon us unless one struggles to break the cycle of hatred and violence that invariably leads to ever more suffering by innocent human beings.”

NONFICTION

“A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy” by Thomas Buergenthal; Little, Brown and Co.; $24.99; 228 pages