Thomas Buergenthal survived Auschwitz at the age of ten and Sachsenhausen at eleven. He went on to become one of the leading international human rights lawyers of his generation, a judge of the International Court of Justice at The Hague, and the principal author of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ jurisprudence on enforced disappearance. The boy who walked out of Sachsenhausen in May 1945 weighing fifty pounds spent the rest of his life building the legal architecture that, in part, exists because of what was done to him.
Buergenthal was born in 1934 in Lubochna in Slovakia to German Jewish parents who had fled Berlin in 1933. The family moved to the small Polish town of Katowice and then in 1939 to the Kielce ghetto. From the ghetto they were deported in August 1944 to Auschwitz. The mother was selected for labour. Thomas, ten, walked through the selection holding his father’s hand and was sent with him to the men’s camp; the SS doctor on the ramp does not seem to have noticed the child. He spent five months in the men’s camp at Auschwitz before the death march of 18 January 1945. The march to Gleiwitz, in deep winter, was the worst single experience of his survival; he later wrote that he had survived it because his father had carried him for stretches and because the SS shooting of stragglers had thinned out by the time the column reached Gleiwitz.
His father died on the march. Thomas reached Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin. He survived the next four months by passing as the mascot of a kapo who had taken a liking to him. He was eleven at liberation by Soviet forces on 22 April 1945. His feet had been frostbitten on the death march and he lost two toes. He found his mother in 1946; she had survived Ravensbrück.
The family emigrated to the United States in 1951. Thomas studied at Bethany College, Harvard Law and the New York University international law programme. He taught law at SUNY Buffalo, Texas, Emory and George Washington. He served on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights from 1979 to 1991, including a term as president, during which the court developed the most rigorous body of jurisprudence in the world on the prosecution of enforced disappearance, drawing on cases from the Argentine, Chilean and Honduran dirty wars. He served on the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador in 1992 and 1993. He was a judge of the International Court of Justice at The Hague from 2000 to 2010, the only American to have served on both the Inter-American Court and the ICJ.
His memoir A Lucky Child was published in German in 2007 and in English in 2009. The book is short, restrained, lawyerly. He did not write it until he was over seventy because, as he wrote in the introduction, he had wanted his children to grow up in an American home and not a survivor’s home. The decision to write was prompted by the realisation that the next generation needed the testimony in writing.
Buergenthal died on 29 May 2023 at the age of eighty nine. He had spent his career making it harder for states to murder their own citizens with impunity. The connection between the boy in Auschwitz and the international law judge was direct and acknowledged. He often said that without the catastrophe he would not have become a human rights lawyer, and that he had chosen the work as a form of paying back what he had been spared.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards