There has to be an outside force protecting our human rights, said Thomas Buergenthal; judge at the International Court in the Hague and acclaimed author of A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy.

 

“I have never felt that you could rely on the individual countries,” he mused, an opinion born out of his experience growing up in the most notorious concentration camp in the Second World War. “There has to be some international law or institution to ensure that these violations don’t take place again.”

 

This is a definitive argument centred around an issue that has been brought close to home in recent weeks. We are on the cusp of a momentous period in international law. David Cameron and his newly elected government plan to repeal the Human Rights Act, a move which Buergenthal thinks “would be a very sad mistake.”

 

He is better placed than most to comment on the horrors these laws are in place to prevent. Buergenthal’s memoir – a revised edition of which is being released in light of more documentation coming to the surface – offers a personal account of his journey to Auschwitz, a young boy’s fight for survival and the joyous moment in which he and his mother were reunited in peacetime.

 

Buergenthal’s job as an errand boy gave him a function within his surroundings that may have saved his life. Harrowingly, he tells a story about one of the errands he was ordered to do: Collecting the glass gas cannisters that were dropped into the chambers, breaking and dispersing their lethal contents. He said, “I found out later that they were used to kill people.”

 

He also recounts Josef Mengele; the Auschwitz doctor, nicknamed the Angel of Death. Buergenthal described how he tried to escape Mengele’s guards three times before finally resigning himself to a horrible fate. Oddly, it is clear when watching this quiet, contemplative man speak, he is one of life’s great optimists; something Buergenthal claims he inherits from his father.

 

Buergenthal’s prose has been hailed for the way in which he crystallizes his childhood memories, writing so authentically with the voice of an 8-year-old, despite being “afraid I would lose voice of the child.”

Although Buergenthal wrote the memoir 60 years after the fact, his memory is and spurred on by small events. “I never really remember things chronologically.” Rather he recalls moments and objects like the “…little red car that we had to leave behind.”

 

A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy was so long in fruition because Buergenthal’s life has been so full in adulthood. “Teaching, marriage, children, this all take time as I’m sure you all know! But I realised I’m not immortal, I had to write the book I had always wanted to write.” He added, laughing, maybe it was my heart playing up that did it!”

 

“To this day I can’t see movies about Auschwitz. Seeing those trains immediately affects me.” In a rare moment of raw emotion, Thomas said when he is confronted by this sight, “Tears come and I just tighten.” This is why it is so evident, through this man’s words, that our basic human rights must be protected.

Buergenthal is adamant that if the institutions of international law existed in 1938 and 1939, “they would have prevented what happened to me.”

 

 

Photo: Courtesy of Hay Festival
Text: Francesca Donovan