A Lucky Child

After being separated from Buergenthal in Auschwitz, Mutti was sent to “the notorious women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück” (150). In 1945, Ravensbrück was evacuated, and she marched to Malchow. She was one of the few women who survived the march. Then, “[o]n April 28, 1945, Malchow was liberated by advancing Soviet troops” (150). At that point, Mutti was approximately 60 kilometers from Buergenthal, but they wouldn’t be reunited for another year and a half. After her liberation, Mutti traveled to Kielce, Poland, where she had agreed with Mundek to meet if they survived the war. There, she learned that Buergenthal and his father had been separated, and that Mundek died at Flossenbürg concentration camp shortly before the end of the war. No one Mutti asked knew what had happened to Buergenthal, but many told her there was no way a child survived the death march, and that for her own good she should move on: “But she would have none of it. She knew that I was alive, for hadn’t the fortune-teller proclaimed that I was a ‘lucky child’” (152-153). Mutti then left for Göttingen, Germany, her hometown, to search for her child:

It was not easy for her to find herself back in the Göttingen she remembered from her once-happy childhood and then the Nazi period. Almost as soon as the Nazis had come to power, most of Mutti’s non-Jewish school friends acted as if they had never known her. They would cross the street when they saw her approaching or look the other way in order not to have to greet her. She was treated even worse the two times she returned to Göttingen from Lubochna to visit my grandparents and show me off, her new baby. Now, after the war, these same women embraced her on the street and acted as if nothing had happened in the past (153).

She could still faintly see her family’s name on the store the Nazis forced them to sell for a pittance. There were, however, also pleasant aspects of returning to Göttingen, and friendly faces to see. One such friend helped her family whenever possible and hid a suitcase of family mementos for the Silbergleits, which she returned to Mutti:

For Mutti, the pictures were a treasure trove. All her family pictures, including photos of her parents, my father, and me, had been lost in the camps. Erased with the destruction of these pictures, it seemed to her, was proof that her family had ever existed. Now Mutti could again look at those images of a happier life long ago, before the Nazis destroyed it all. It was the first good thing that had happened to her since her return to Göttingen (156).

In the mementos was Mutti’s brother Eric’s address in the United States. She corresponded with him and he helped her locate Buergenthal on a registry of Jews interested in emigrating to Palestine. The registry led them to the orphanage, where they found Buergenthal. During this time, Mutti also remarried to a man named Dr. Leon Reitter, who was with them at the Henryków labor camp. They were wed before Buergenthal arrived in Göttingen. 

After many years, Buergenthal made his way to his parents' native country where he could start to have his own life again: “When I arrived in Germany at the end of December 1946, I was twelve and a half years old” (161). Buergenthal felt “a tremendous burden had been lifted from [his] shoulders” (161)—that he could finally be a child. Buergenthal made friends, received tutoring to catch up in school, and began to live as a normal child. However, he still struggled to cope with the reality that he was living among those who were complicit in his family’s murder and his suffering: “I would observe them from our balcony with envy and hatred. Here were fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, walking with their children and grandchildren—people who, for all I knew, had killed my father and grandparents” (163). Buergenthal did not overcome these feelings for a long time: “It took me much longer to realize that one cannot hope to protect mankind from crimes such as those that were visited upon us unless one struggles to break the cycle of hatred and violence that invariably leads to ever more suffering by innocent human beings” (163).

Buergenthal’s tutor, Otto Biedermann, was a formative figure in Buergenthal’s life. Otto was from Upper Silesia, expelled when it was taken over by Poland. He emigrated to Göttingen as a refugee. He “introduced [Buergenthal] to the joy of learning” (163). Otto explained to Mutti that Buergenthal “lacked even the most rudimentary educational background and needed to be tutored as if [he] were a six-year-old,” but also “had the life experience and maturity of a grown-up and could discuss subjects with him that no child [his] age would normally be aware of or interested in” (166). Otto became a great friend to Buergenthal and “la[id] the intellectual foundation for the life [he] was destined to live” (167). When Buergenthal was ready to attend school, he was the only Jewish student:

None of my classmates had ever met a Jew, but, as some told me later, they had seen Nazi cartoons depicting Jews as dark-skinned, alien-looking people with long crooked noses, black beards, and rapacious faces that were intended, because of their caricatured ugliness, to illustrate the repulsive character of Jews (168).

Buergenthal’s classmates eventually shed their preconceptions based on the Nazi propaganda on which their perceptions were constructed and he “gradually came to feel that [he] was indeed one of them” (169). His teachers did not all feel the same way. Many had been members of the Nazi party and Buergenthal’s presence made them uncomfortable. After the war, they were supposed to submit to a denazification process, but many serious Nazis slipped through the cracks.

Dr. Reitter became Buergenthal’s “surrogate father” (173). Buergenthal describes him as a gentle and kind person who he came to love and admire. Dr. Reitter took great efforts to aid Buergenthal in his education and make up for his lost time. Buergenthal at one point decided he would study medicine like Dr. Reitter. Unfortunately, the doctor died of a heart condition at the age of 48, once again leaving Mutti a widow and Buergenthal without a father: “At that point we both decided that there was no God in heaven” (176).

Later, Buergenthal read in the newspaper about an old acquaintance:

[A] Norwegian by the name of Odd Nansen, son of the famous Norwegian explorer and statesman Fridtjof Nansen, had recently published the diary he had kept in various camps in Norway as well as in Sachsenhausen and that it had become the most widely read book in Norway (177).

Buergenthal had forgotten the name of the Norwegian in Sachsenhausen who was so kind to him, so he wrote to Odd, asking if he was the man or if not, if he knew the man. Several weeks later, several crates of Norwegian goods were delivered to Buergenthal and Mutti, along with a letter stating that Odd was in fact the man Buergenthal knew, that Buergenthal was featured in his book, and that many Norwegians would be happy to learn Buergenthal was alive. Odd had unsuccessfully searched for Buergenthal and assumed he had not survived. Odd visited Buergenthal in Germany, Buergenthal travelled to Norway, and the two remained close until Odd’s death. Odd instilled in Buergenthal a compassion for humanity and led him to pursue humanitarian work:

The years I spent in Göttingen after the war were very important in helping me cope with my attitudes toward Germany and Germans. Those were not easy years for Mutti or me, and we often envied some of our fellow Kielce survivors who had ended up in Sweden right after the war. They did not have to face the economic hardships we faced in postwar Germany, nor did they have to struggle with the emotions we felt when contemplating the possibility that we were living amid murderers. At the same time, by living in Germany not long after our concentration camp experience, we were forced to confront those emotions in a way that helped Mutti and me gradually overcome our hatred and desire for revenge.

Later, in America, I realized that many of my Jewish friends and acquaintances who had come to the United States before the war and thus escaped the Holocaust were much less forgiving than Mutti and I. I doubt that we would have been able to preserve our sanity had we remained consumed by hatred for the rest of our lives. Many of our relatives and friends in America never understood what we meant when we tried to explain that, while it was important not to forget what happened to us in the Holocaust, it was equally important not to hold the descendants of the perpetrators responsible for what was done to us, lest the cycle of hate and violence never end (192). 

Buergenthal “arrived in New York on December 4, 1951” (193) and then in Paterson, New Jersey where he met his uncle Eric Silberg, formerly Silbergleit, his aunt Senta, and his cousin, Gay. Buergenthal did not know that he would settle in the United States permanently. He didn’t consider himself German the same way his classmates did. The term fatherland “triggered in [him] memories of Hitler and the Nazis; so too did the sound and words of the German national anthem” (194). It had been only six years since he was liberated and Buergenthal felt he could not put his past behind him remaining in Germany. Mutti remarried a man named Jacob Rosenholz, “another survivor of the Ghetto of Kielce” (195), and moved to Italy. Buergenthal did not want to go to Italy, and with his mother leaving Germany, his choice to emigrate was made. He thought that he would live in the United States only temporarily, then settle in Israel: “[T]hat sense of belonging was becoming an important consideration in my thinking about the future” (196).

There was a screening process for refugees to the United States, but to Buergenthal’s surprise, it focused on finding and denying admission to communists and leftists rather than Nazi sympathizers. Many Nazi war criminals were admitted due to sloppy screening. Buergenthal’s ship docked in New York on December 3, 1951, but they could not disembark until the next morning:

I stood at the ship’s railing, fascinated by a sky drenched in the reflected colors of the multitude of lights that illuminated the city, I was transported back to Auschwitz and the reddish brown smoke bellowing out of the crematorium chimneys. Suddenly, the life I had lived-Kielce, Auschwitz, the Death March, Sachsenhausen-flashed before my eyes. Right then and there, I knew that I would never quite liberate myself from that past and that it would forever shape my life. But I also knew that I would not let it have a debilitating or destructive effect on the new life I was just about to begin. My past would inspire my future and give it meaning (205).