EVENT PREVIEW
Courage and Compassion – A Lucky Child Survives Auschwitz. 7-8:30 p.m. Jan. 24. Guests are encouraged to arrive early (doors open at 5:30 p.m.) to go through check-in, which will include security personnel checking bags. Event is followed by a book signing with Thomas Buergenthal. "Confronting Auschwitz" exhibit opens at 5:30 pm. Free; RSVP is required at courageandcompassion.eventbrite.com. Westin Atlanta Perimeter North Hotel, 7 Concourse Parkway N.E., Sandy Springs.
MORE: During World War II, Hitler's army ordered a young Jewish girl named Ilse Eichner Reiner to the Terezin concentration camp near Prague before transferring her to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of the 15,000 children sent to Terezin, Reiner is one of only 132 known to have survived. Today, Reiner lives in Sandy Springs near her daughter. Read her journey here.
On a sunny day in August 1944, Thomas Buergenthal stepped off a cattle car at Birkenau, part of the sprawling Auschwitz concentration camp complex.
Odds of survival for adults in Auschwitz were dismal. They were even worse for children, particularly young children.
Buergenthal was just 10 years old. By a stroke of luck and uncanny narrow escapes, Buergenthal survived.
“I really don’t know why I survived,” he said. “I had the advantage of speaking both German and Polish fluently, which helped, and I really basically grew up in the camps. I always looked at myself like being the street children in Latin America. Learning the tricks of the game. And a lot of luck. Nobody survived without luck.”
Buergenthal, now 81 and living in the District of Columbia area, is considered one of the world’s leading international human rights experts. He served on the International Court of Justice in the Hague from 2000 to 2010. His long academic career includes an endowed professorship at Emory University in the 1980s while also serving as director of the human rights program at the Carter Center.
On Jan. 24, Buergenthal will be the keynote speaker at a Holocaust awareness event, Courage and Compassion — A Lucky Child Survives Auschwitz. The event, organized by Am Yisrael Chai, a local Holocaust awareness and education organization, will be held at the Westin Atlanta Perimeter North Hotel in Sandy Springs. It is free and open to the public.
While visiting Atlanta, Buergenthal also is scheduled to participate in a symbolic daffodil planting at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. Already, Am Yisrael Chai has planted 176,000 daffodils in downtown Atlanta (and 280,000 around the world) in memory of the estimated 1.5 million children who perished during the Holocaust, as well as in support of children suffering humanitarian crises in the world today. (For more information about the Daffodil Project, go to daffodilproject.net.)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently talked with Buergenthal by phone. Here are excerpts from the interview:
Q: Why did you entitle your memoir about surviving Auschwitz "A Lucky Child"?
A: In 1939, when we were getting ready to move to Poland, a friend of my mother's talked her into going to see a fortuneteller. … The fortuneteller told my mother terrible things were going to happen to the family relatively soon. Then she said, "But you have a child, a lucky child, and nothing is going to happen to him." It was a very good title for the book, because of what the fortuneteller did for my mother: It gave her courage to keep looking for me. It took two years looking for me after the war. Hardly any children my age survived. Everybody kept telling her to accept that I died in the camps, and she insisted, "I know he's alive."
Q: Mass shootings, the Islamic State group, atrocities around the globe. What do you think about the state of the world today?
A: I will tell you, long ago I decided not to be dispirited by things happening (in the world), because if you do that, then eventually you give up. I've devoted myself to working in the human rights field all these years and I am a perennial optimist and I have always thought that, if you weren't, you shouldn't be in human rights work. I see what Germany is doing — admitting so many (Syrian) refugees, which to me is a wonderful sign for a country that committed the Holocaust and now is willing to help. It gives one hope.
Q: What can we do to become a better world?
A: I have always felt that what we don't do enough is early teaching of tolerance to children all around the world. You need to start very early when children are just starting school, that they learn to get along with people. We should have tolerance programs in our schools — in our country, and other countries as well, because what has led to all of these terrible things happening is the intolerance between religion, nationalities, between races. The only way to combat that is with tolerance.
