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- [00:02]
A
Some type of either yard work or handyman work for the family. Previously, his parents lived next door to the Wylers. Generation X versus set. Welcome. Thank you very much. Now.
- [03:11]
B
Their share.
- [03:35]
A
T r t r. There. Okay, Yeah. Also under.
- [10:26]
B
I'm Andrew Franklin, I'm the publisher of Profile Books and I'm delighted to be talking to Tom Bogenthal, who is the author of A Lucky Child, which is his extraordinary book about his childhood. Lived in Germany and Poland through the Holocaust. It's been a huge bestseller in Germany and the Netherlands and Spain. And it's coming out where else?
- [10:47]
A
It's coming out in Norway and in Sweden, Japan, Brazil, the United States.
- [10:53]
B
And most important of all, it's coming out in the UK in January 2009. What motivated you to write what must have been a very painful book, must have opened terrible memories.
- [11:06]
A
Well, I felt all along that it's really very important that those of us who survived the Holocaust write down what happened for history's sake. And I also felt it was important my family. So initially I sort of thought of writing something like letters to my sons. Then the grandchildren came, then I thought of letters from my grandchildren. Eventually I realized that it wouldn't work that way. And I always had the feeling I had to write this book so that there would be just one more sort of something left behind from a family that was basically a stage distinguished in the camp. Telling what happened to us.
- [11:54]
B
Perhaps you could give a brief reprise of what, of the story, because it is quite extraordinary.
- [12:01]
A
Well, the story really begins in Slovakia, where I was born. My parents left Germany. My Hitler came to power thinking that Hitler wouldn't last more than a few years and they didn't really want to go too far away. And then of course, I was born in 1934, which was not a good time for a Jewish child to be born in Europe. By 38, we were already on the run. 38, 39. The Germans came into Czechoslovakia. We moved to Poland. Within a short period of time, they caught us in Poland, actually on the day when we were supposed to leave for England, Germany marched into Poland. And that's when it all began. And it didn't end until I survived the ghetto of concentration camp of Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, the death march from Auschwitz to Sachsenhausen. And then, believe it or not, after we were separated for more than two and a half years, I found my mother. That is to say, she found me in an orphanage in Poland. In the meantime, I had been a mascot of the Polish army, which liberated me. And I always say I liberated Berlin because I was in Berlin with Polish troops. So it was in some ways an exciting life, which. Which I don't wish on anybody, but something that had to be told.
- [13:35]
B
And your father did not survive?
- [13:36]
A
My father did not survive. My father was executed, apparently. We were not quite sure. We got different stories about three days before the end of the war.
- [13:47]
B
Tragically, 6 million people did not survive the Holocaust. A very small number did. To what do you attribute your extraordinary good fortune? And indeed, from others?
- [14:00]
A
Basically, we don't have an answer other than to say, like, we were not at the wrong place at the wrong time. We were. We managed to escape. Different. Different people helped me in the camp. That's why I called the book a lucky child, really, because I was in all this terrible hell and really was lucky. I can't describe it to anything else. Certainly nothing I would take credit for in terms of intelligence or anything else, just having made it when others didn't.
- [14:37]
B
You had blonde hair and blue eyes. Did you still have striking blue eyes, do you think? The fact that you didn't look like the archetypal, the Nazi stereotype of the Jew, but you looked like a Nazi state happen there, did that make a difference?
- [14:52]
A
I think it helped the fact that I spoke German, the way their children spoke German on a number of occasions, that made a difference. But, you know, you never could count on those things because you never. A lot of the killing was anonymous, without looking at. And certainly in one case it was clear when I said to the head who was doing the getting ready to execute all of the children in this one camp where I was, when I went to him and said in German, I can work, Captain. He looked at me and he said, well, let's see. And he let me live. And I've always attributed that to the fact that when he looked at me and heard me speak German, he must have thought of his children. There was some sort of human quality in the person that came through. But I must say, I don't know. I was helped by a lot of people in the camp. I was helped by even some Germans. So I was lucky.
- [15:57]
B
There are some very, very extraordinary scenes in the book, aren't there? Because at some point there's an SS officer when you're in the hospital in Auschwitz, who perhaps saves your life, certainly is very important in helping you. And then there are ordinary Polish people who betray you. Do you think there's any sort of theory of human nature which underpins the book? Or indeed your idea of why you might have survived?
- [16:20]
A
No, I don't think so. I mean, asked often about this, Thinking back, I've often sort of wondered. For example, in one case, my own fellow inmates gave me away as I was trying to escape. They knew they were going into the gas chamber. Why they gave me away, I don't understand. In other cases, some of the inmates would help me, even though it meant that they would eat less. So it's human nature. But what it is in human nature that does it, I don't know. In one instance, an assessment gave me a cup of coffee. It was the first warm thing I drank in 10 days in open railroad cars on the death march out of Auschwitz. Why did he do it? At the same time, there was a German woman going past one of our trains. It stinks again of Jews. How do you explain all of this? I must say, when I wrote the book, I suddenly had so many questions and so few answers.
- [17:33]
B
I think that's true of all the best books, isn't it? That it forces one to confront big issues and to think about very, very unusually after the Holocaust, the Second World War. Well, not unusually, you went to America, but then you decided to go a lawyer and to specialise in international law. And you've had an extraordinary, important and successful career as an international lawyer, now as a judge in the International Court in the Hague. Was that those decisions in that career influenced by your experiences in the Holocaust?
- [18:07]
A
Initially, I thought that it wasn't. I just thought I was studying law and I thought, well, I could be better at certain things in certain fields of law than others. International law being one, would help with my languages. But gradually I came to the conclusion that what really drew me into international, to international law and to human rights particularly, which is something I specialize on, was the realization, and I came to that really much later, that each of us who survived the camp, the camps, really has an obligation to do something, to give something back, everybody in his own way. I thought I could do it by being in the human rights field or being an international others, by being doctors, by. In other ways, helping people. And that sort of conviction became stronger and stronger. The older I got, the more I began to think about sort of what do I owe as a result of my survival. I never had this sense of survivor syndrome that I felt that somehow I had. I should have a bad conscience, that I survived. That wasn't the sense, but I felt I did have an obligation to others as a result of that. And that's where. In the human rights field and international, that's where I could do something that others probably couldn't. If I had been good in science, I probably would have become a doctor, but I wasn't good in that. So there are lots of things those of us who survive can do to sort of pay back, express our gratitude for having made it. Absolutely. Absolute. They go, What? Oh, yeah, X versus the podcast. Absolutely.