A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal

A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal

Copyright 2009 (orig. publ'd in 2007)

Little, Brown and Company - NF/Memoir

228 pages

To speak of the Holocaust in terms of numbers--six million--which is the way it is usually done, is to unintentionally dehumanize the victims and to trivialize the profoundly human tragedy it was. The numbers transform the victims into a fungible mass of nameless, soulless bodies rather than treating them as the individual human beings they were.

A survivor of the Holocaust, Thomas Buergenthal was a mere 5 years old when his family was forced to move into a Jewish ghetto in Poland. Four years and two work camps later, they were shipped to Auschwitz, where they were separated. Miraculously, Thomas was able to stay with his father for quite a while and both he and his mother survived their time both in concentration camps and on separate death marches just prior to liberation. A Lucky Child is his story.

Buergenthal chose to write this book solely from his own viewpoint, as he remembers it, in part because the few people he could have consulted to verify details are no longer living and because he simply wasn't ready to revisit that pain until recently. Although the dates and the details may not be perfect, it's a powerful book and an amazing story of survival against odds. In the final pages of A Lucky Child, Buergenthal describes his life after the war and how he has become a vigorous advocate for human rights throughout the world.

I read a lot of Holocaust memoirs and it's amazing to how many different viewpoints one can read. It's simply never-ending, in part because of the sheer quantity of different backgrounds and countries from which imprisoned Jews hailed, a sad reminder of how many countries were conquered by the Nazis during that period of our world's history and an excellent reminder that we're really no different than those who lived and died in that time period. In fact, Buergenthal's mother, when young, bore a somewhat startling resemblance to my own mother when she was the same age.

As in the other books I've read, there was some totally new information. There's always something new. A Lucky Child is beautifully written and very, very moving. I highly recommend it, particularly to those who enjoy reading memoirs or anything relating to WWII. "Fungible" (in the quote, above) was a new word for me, by the way. It means "interchangeable".

I'm thinking about going back to rating books, always something that I've felt iffy about but found that I like at other blogs. What do you think? If I were to rate A Lucky Child, I'd go with 4.5/5.

And, now, to lighten the mood . . . a Costa Rican baby bunny:

Have a hoppy day!

Bookfool, who knows that was really, really bad