A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy [Paperback]

The profoundly moving memoir of a young boy's odyssey through the Holocaust.

In a new edition of his bestselling memoir, Thomas Buergenthal tells of his astonishing experiences as a young boy. Buergenthal arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and one work camp. Separated from his mother and then his father, he managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life.

Since the initial publication of this book, new documents have been made available, allowing Buergenthal to finally learn the details of his mother's search for him and the truth about his father. With a new afterword by the author sharing these revelations, A LUCKY CHILD is a classic that demands to be read by all.Considered one of the world's leading international human rights law experts,Thomas Buergenthalserved as a judge at the International Court of Justice and prior thereto as judge and president of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. He is the Lobingier Professor of Comparative Law & Jurisprudence at the George Washington University Law School, and the recipient of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's 2015 Elie Wiesel Award. In the plainest words and the steadiest tones (as an intimate would speak deadly truth in the dead of night), Thomas Buergenthal delivers to us the child he once was: an unblemished little boy made human prey byEurope's indelible twentieth-century barbarism, a criminality that will never leave off its telling. History and memory fail to ebb; rather, they accelerate and proliferate, and Buergenthal's voice is now more thunderous than ever. Pledged to universal human rights, he has turned a life of gratuitous deliverance into a work of visionary compassion. Cynthia Ozick, author ofHeir to the Glimmering World