The Child Who Cheated Fate

On this day of celebration for Jews and Christians, I thought I would spare you the daily grind of international news and commentary and give you a more human story. This is a true and inspiring story retold with permission from the person who lived it. I hope it will make you feel blessed that we live in a time of peace, prosperity, and security. Blessed that one man cheated fate and grew up to be good and great. Blessed that today our children need not cheat fate to grow up and have a chance to be good and great.

One year ago this November, my family and I had the privilege to have lunch in The Peace Palace with Judge Thomas Buergenthal, the American judge on the International Court of Justice. I had had the honor to work closely with Judge Buergenthal at the Claims Resolution Tribunal in Zurich, Switzerland a few years back. He was quite fond of my children then, and now welcomed the chance to become reacquainted with them.

As we arrived at the Peace Palace, Judge Buergenthal and his wife Peggy graciously greeted us in his chambers and escorted us to the judge’s dining quarters at the Peace Palace. It is an intimate and warm restaurant reserved for the judges and their guests. My wife and I warned our children, then 8 and 10, about just how important this man was and how much we respected him. I desperately wanted them to be on their best behavior. Thankfully, they were.

After a delightful lunch on white-linen cloth, I gathered up the courage to ask Judge Buergenthal if he might be willing to tell my children what he was doing when he was their age. My children had just finished visiting the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and they knew full well that Hitler was intent on finding and killing Jews during World War II. But they had never heard a real story of the Holocaust from the perspective of an actual child survivor.

I knew Judge Buergenthal was fairly open about discussing his experience at Auschwitz, see here, but I did not want to presume that this was the appropriate occasion for such a discussion. Happily, the judge was more than willing to oblige. As my children’s eyes widened with astonishment, he said, “When I was your age I was a soldier in the Polish army.” He then told a long story about what life was like as a child survivor of Auschwitz sixty years ago.

He said you had to be clever, street-smart, to have any hope to survive each day of the Holocaust. Every morning at roll call he knew the routine. The Germans would pick off the weakest of the group for the gas chamber. Young Tom knew that he had to be invisible to avoid that fate. So he would hide in the back rows during roll call, answer when called upon, and then quickly sneak back to the barracks to hide in the shadows. It was a constant, daily game of cat and mouse for the young boy of Auschwitz.

In early 1945 young Tom was forced to participate in the Auschwitz death marches. To avoid getting shot as a straggler, he and two other boys would run to the front of the line, rest a few minutes while the rest of the group passed him by, and then repeat the routine over and over. As a result of the death march, young Tom became seriously ill. He was sent to the health ward at Sachsenhausen for treatment for frost bite. He knew that this injury meant his death, for the next stop would be the gas chamber. But as he lay there recovering in the ward, he suddenly noticed a strange silence. The Germans had all fled. No guards, no staff, no watchmen. As he sat in that ward, awaiting his imminent death, it was then that he realized that the Allied forces had liberated the camp. The Russians had arrived. Tom Buergenthal was one of three child survivors of the Auschwitz death marches.

Judge Buergenthal then told my children his remarkable experience after his liberation from Auschwitz. He said that when the Russians learned he spoke Polish, they sent him over to the nearby Polish army. The Polish army adopted this young ten-year-old as their mascot. They gave him a small horse, put a Polish uniform on him, and gave him a musket. This ten-year-old mascot of the Polish army was there rooting the Russians and Poles in the 1945 Battle for Berlin.

As Judge Buergenthal finished speaking, my children’s eyes were wide and receptive. They said scarcely a word. They could hardly believe this story of this old man who now sat on the International Court of Justice who was once a ten-year-old child survivor of Auschwitz and a young soldier in the Second World War.

As we left the lunch and were waiting in the lobby at the Peace Palace my oldest son asked for his diary from his backpack. He began retelling the story to himself in his halting cursive. The diary entry began, “Today I met a great man…”