A Lucky Child

After the Czech Communist regime collapsed in December 1989, Buergenthal obtained his birth certificate and visited his place of birth in Lubochna, a resort town in the Tatra Mountains in what is today Slovakia. Buergenthal’s parents, Mundek and Gerda “Mutti” Buergenthal, owned and operated a hotel in Lubochna. Mundek, a Pole working as a bank officer in Germany, “moved to Lubochna from Germany shortly before Hitler came to power in 1933” (5) with a friend, Erich Godal, who was an anti-Nazi political cartoonist working for the Berlin daily. Mundek and Erich believed Hitler’s appeal would wane and that in several years they would return to Berlin. Buergenthal’s mother, Gerda, or “Mutti,” was sent by her parents to Mundek’s hotel from Göttingen in 1933. Mutti had a non-Jewish lover, so to avoid harassment from Nazi youths, Buergenthal believes his grandparents sent Mutti with an agreement to marry Mundek. Buergenthal’s parents were engaged three days after meeting and married only weeks later. Buergenthal was born approximately 11 months later.

Buergenthal recalls in late 1938 or early 1939 being told by his parents that they must leave their hotel: “[T]he Hlinka Guard, a Slovak fascist party supported by Nazi Germany that controlled Slovakia […] claimed to have […] a court order declaring a group close to it the owner of [their] hotel” (14). With no way to challenge the confiscation, they hurriedly gathered what belongings they could and left. They moved to Zilina, Slovakia. Mundek obtained a job as a travelling salesman, while Mutti cooked for the first time (as their hotel in Lubochna had a chef), and they attempted to get by until they were discovered:

One day, while my father was out of town, the police came to our apartment and ordered my mother to pack our belongings and make sure that we would be ready to go with them within the hour. We were Jews and undesirable foreigners, we were told, and were being expelled from the country (18).

They were taken to the police station, but Mutti tricked the police into thinking they were non-Jewish Germans, mistakenly rounded up, and they were released. When Buergenthal’s father returned, they left Slovakia for Poland, where Mundek believed he could procure visas to travel to England as political refugees.

Mundek had lost his Polish citizenship years ago because he remained outside Poland for more than five years, and the Nazis denaturalized every Jew, so the Buergenthals were stateless and unable to enter Poland. They were stuck in a 50-yard stretch of land between Czechoslovakia and Poland, unable to enter Poland or return to Czechoslovakia until heavily armed German Soldiers, for reasons unknown to Buergenthal, arrived and ordered the Poles to grant them entry: “That is how we got into Poland. It must have been March of 1939, for that is when Germany marched into Czechoslovakia. I was almost five years old (25). 

In Poland, Buergenthal first went to Warsaw, where Mundek had relatives. Buergenthal enjoyed himself and played with other children. They left Warsaw for Katowice, a city in southern Poland that was a gathering point for German Jewish refugees. In Katowice, they registered with the British consulate to obtain travel documents to emigrate to England as refugees. Buergenthal enjoyed the refugee community in Katowice. Friends became “uncles” and “aunts,” and Buergenthal played while waiting for their lucky day- the day their visas would arrive from the British consulate. While waiting, Mutti visited a famous fortune teller who told her Buergenthal was “ein Glückskind—a lucky child—and that he would emerge unscathed from the future that awaited [them]. […] The fortune-teller’s prediction about [Buergenthal] would sustain [his] mother’s hopes in the years ahead, when [they] were separated” (30). On September 1, 1939, they received travel visas to England:

But it was not to be. On our ‘lucky day,’ Hitler decided to invade Poland. When we arrived at the Katowice railroad station, where our transport was to be put together, the people from the British consulate told us that it was no longer possible to leave from a Polish port. Arrangements had therefore been made to get us to England via the Balkans (31).

They boarded a railroad car with other refugees and Polish soldiers, but they did not make it to England. The train stopped en route amid Nazi bombing and a battle ensued. The Buergenthals ran from the train into nearby fields, along with other passengers screaming, crying, and running for their lives. Mutti threw herself on Buergenthal and Mundek shielded both with his body. The bombing eventually ceased, but the tracks were destroyed, and they could not continue on rail.

Along with other Jewish refugees, they continued on foot to the nearby town of Sandomierz. They walked during the day and slept in barns at night:

The farmers would charge us for the use of their barns and sell us food. Often, the barns would already be rented out by the time we got there, and then we would have to sleep outside. Some farmers were kind to us; others were not. The latter frequently called us bad names. Here I first learned that we were Parzywe Zydzi—Scabby Jews (33).

They contemplated traveling to Russia, but Mundek inquired and learned that “[t]errible things [were] happening in that country. Not a good place for foreigners; many of them [were] being sent to Siberia” (34). They decided it would be better to remain in Poland and continued their trek, re-routed to Kielce, a Polish city with a large Jewish community. 

The Buergenthals were assigned a small one-bedroom apartment by the city’s Jewish community council shortly before the ghetto was established by the German police in 1940: “We lived in Kielce for about four years until we were transported to Auschwitz in early August of 1944. Lived is probably not the right word to describe our incarceration in that bleary Polish industrial city, its ghetto, and two different work camps” (38). Jews starved in the ghetto. Mundek obtained a job cooking for the German police, from which he smuggled food, and Buergenthal found a job and food working for wealthy Jewish families in the ghetto as “a Shabbat goy, or a Sabbath gentile” (38), performing tasks on the Sabbath from which more orthodox Jews were religiously prohibited. Despite the semblance of routine, peril still surrounded the Buergenthals:

Once all Jews had been moved into what became the Ghetto of Kielce, the area was surrounded by walls and fences and guarded by Jewish and Polish police as well as the [German police]. […] [S]ome Poles were still allowed to come in, mostly to sell vegetables, milk, and firewood (40).

Life in the ghetto became increasingly difficult and dangerous. One German police officer “would come into the ghetto and randomly kill people as he walked down the street” (43) and German raids of the ghetto became more frequent: “[T]hese raids would begin with a contingent of heavily armed soldiers driving up to a house. They would storm inside, pull people out, and drag them into their trucks. Anyone who resisted was kicked and beaten. Some people were shot on the spot” (43). Jews in the ghetto “denounced” other ghetto Jews to the Gestapo, for various offences. Those denounced were “picked up by the Gestapo, never to be seen again,” and Buergenthal “soon learned not to tell anyone what [he] heard in [their] apartment” (44).

Mundek was placed in charge of the ghetto workshop, a small factory where tailors, shoemakers, furriers, hatters, and other artisans worked for the Gestapo. The workshop was just outside the ghetto, so Mundek had permits to leave the ghetto for work. The Buergenthals discovered that Mutti’s parents “had been deported from their home in Göttingen, Germany, to the Ghetto of Warsaw” (46). Mundek used his connections at the workshop to arrange their transfer to Kielce: “To me it was a miracle, the nicest thing that had happened to us in years. My mother was very, very happy, and I finally had grandparents like some of my friends” (46). Buergenthal's relationship with his grandparents allowed him to temporarily transcend the ghetto:

Visiting them was to enter another world, a world far removed from the ghetto, one full of love and tranquility. Here, I felt safe and protected. The stories they told me about the past and the future transported me into a world in which all people lived in peace and where being a Jew was not a crime (47).

Then the tenuous threads of reprieve snapped, and Buergenthal was thrust back into his perilous reality:

One morning in August 1942, while it was still very dark, we were awakened by loud honking, repeated bursts of gunfire, and announcements over loudspeakers: ‘Alle raus, alle raus! Wer nicht raus kommt wird erschossen!’ (‘All out, all out! Whoever does not come out will be shot!’). The ghetto was being liquidated (48-49).

German officers walked through the ghetto’s buildings, shooting sick or old people and forcing the rest out: “We were the last family to come out of our building, just ahead of the marauding German death squads” (49). Mundek snuck his family, other workshop employees, and their families into the workshop using his pass and by explaining to German officers that he was ordered to protect the workshop: “Along the way, we tried to find my grandparents, but they were nowhere to be found. I never saw them again” (49). Inside the workshop, they could hear gunfire, the sound of Germans murdering large numbers of Jews just outside the walls:

As we approached the square, we could see a group of Gestapo and [German police] officers facing a large crowd of ghetto inmates, all pleading to be allowed to cross over to the other side of the yard, where the people were standing who had been selected to remain in Kielce after the liquidation of the ghetto (51).

The German police recognized that they needed Mundek to run the workshop and let the Buergenthals join the group that would remain. They allowed the other workers to remain also:

[A]ll those who were forced to remain in that square and the others who had been evacuated earlier in the day, including my grandparents, were transported to Treblinka and killed on arrival in that extermination camp. In all, more than twenty thousand people—almost the entire Jewish community of Kielce—were massacred in that operation (52).

Those who remained were transferred to the ghetto’s labor camp. It was the fall of 1942 and Buergenthal was 8. One year later, the labor camp was liquidated. When the labor camp was liquidated, the German police separated children from their parents. A soldier tried to separate Buergenthal from his father, but Mundek resisted and the frantic child pleaded: “‘Captain, I can work.’ He looked at [Buergenthal] for a brief moment and said, ‘Na, das warden wir bald sehen’—‘Well, that we’ll soon get to see.’ Then he motioned [Buergenthal’s] father and [Buergenthal] back toward the column where [they] had been standing” (55-56).

The other children were murdered with hand grenades. The Buergenthals were transported to a sawmill in Henryków where they worked until July 1944, when they boarded a train to Auschwitz.