THOMAS BUERGENTHAL has dedicated his life to international law and the protection of human rights. He has combined a career as a professor of international law with judicial positions and investigatory activities relating to international human rights and the rule of law.

Buergenthal served as the American judge on the International Court of Justice in The Hague from 2000 to 2010. On his return to the United States, he was reappointed Lobingier Professor of Comparative Law and Jurisprudence by the George Washington University Law School in Washington DC, a position he had held from 1989 until his election to the ICJ.

Buergenthal’s academic career began at the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School in 1962. There followed appointments as Fulbright & Jaworski Professor at the University of Texas Law School in Austin; Dean of the Washington College of Law of the American University, Washington DC; I.T. Cohen Professor of Human Rights at the Emory University Law School; and Director of the Human Rights Programme of the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

Prior to his election to the ICJ, Buergenthal served as judge and president of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as well as judge and president of the Administrative Tribunal of the Inter-American Development Bank. He was a member of the UN Human Rights Committee and the UN Truth Commission for El Salvador, and served as chairman of the Committee of Conscience of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and vice chairman of the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland. He is a member of the Ethics Commission of the International Olympic Committee and honorary president of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights.

Buergenthal graduated from Bethany College, West Virginia. He earned his Juris Doctor degree from New York University School of Law, and his Master of Laws and Doctor of Juridical Science degrees from Harvard Law School. He has received more than a dozen honorary doctorates from universities in the US, Europe and Latin America.

He is a recipient of the American Society of International Law 2002 Manley O. Hudson Award; the Gruber Foundation 2008 Justice Prize; and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum 2015 Elie Wiesel Prize. Buergenthal and his wife, Peggy, live in the Washington DC area.

 

‘There is a contrast between the horrors Buergenthal recounts and the positive tone of his memoir. He has waited more than fifty years to write A Lucky Child, and it is the detachment of distance, coupled with the author’s gracious spirit, that steers the prose away from self-pity or anger … It is what makes this memoir so rewarding: in the darkness, the indomitable spirit of the child’ Genevieve Fox, Telegraph

‘Passionate and objective’ Harry McGrath, Sunday Herald

‘A tour de force: simply narrated, at times almost naive – and even more shocking as a result’ Camilla Long, Sunday Times

‘What Thomas Buergenthal has to say, both in bearing witness to the Holocaust and in describing his moral coming-to-adulthood, deserves our attention. He has serious things to tell us about forgiveness, justice and the curious effect of deep trauma on the mind. His is an extraordinary story and he tells it straight.’ Sam Leith, Daily Mail

‘A book that just has to be read’ Pam Norfolk, Lancashire Evening Post

‘In the plainest words and the steadiest tones Thomas Buergenthal delivers to us the child he once was: an unblemished little boy made human prey by Europe’s indelible twentieth-century barbarism. 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 of The Bear Boy

‘An extraordinary and inspiring book by an extraordinary and inspiring man. It’s one of those rare books you devour cover to cover in a single reading. It deserves to be read very widely indeed, especially for anyone desperate for a hint of light in a world that can often seem so very dark.’ Professor Philippe Sands QC

‘It’s a unique, almost magical story – the little boy is like a Kobold or goblin – or some wily younger son in a story by the Brothers Grimm. He survives by a mixture of cunning and sheer dumb luck – he experiences utter horror, but also extraordinary kindness and compassion. This book is also about the getting of wisdom, and young Tommy’s determination not to let his dreadful experiences crush his essential humanity.’ Kate Saunders

‘Wonderful’ Phil Bloomfield, Oxford Times

‘A painfully honest work’ Steve Andrew, Morning Star

‘Thomas Buergenthal is now a distinguished judge at the International Court in The Hague … this book tells his remarkable story … the world can learn from this modest, talented and inspiring man.’ Good Book Guide

‘A deeply moving story … a vivid juxtaposition of matter-of-fact details of the life of a young child and the ultimate horror of a death camp.’ Juliet Gardiner, History Today

‘As understated and optimistic as it is harrowing’ Christopher Hart, Sunday Times

A LUCKY CHILD

A Lucky Child

A MEMOIR OF SURVIVING AUSCHWITZ AS A YOUNG BOY

THOMAS BUERGENTHAL

with a foreword by
ELIE WIESEL

This paperback edition published in 2015

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London WC1X 9HD

www.profilebooks.com

First published in translation by Fischer Verlag, Germany, as Ein Glückskind, 2007

Copyright © Thomas Buergenthal, 2009, 2010, 2015

Foreword copyright © Elie Wiesel, 2009

Foreword translated from French by Jesse Bronner

Photographs are from the author’s collection

Map courtesy of Peter Palm

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 84765 184 6

Dedicated to the memory of my parents, Mundek and Gerda Buergenthal, whose love, strength of character and integrity inspired this book

Contents

Map

Foreword by Elie Wiesel

Preface

Chapter 1: From Lubochna to Poland

Chapter 2: Katowice

Chapter 3: The Ghetto of Kielce

Chapter 4: Auschwitz

Chapter 5: The Auschwitz Death Transport

Chapter 6: Liberation

Chapter 7: Into the Polish Army

Chapter 8: Waiting to Be Found

Chapter 9: A New Beginning

Chapter 10: Life in Germany

Chapter 11: To America

Epilogue

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Are there rules to help a survivor decide the best time to bear witness to history? Which is better: to dare to look directly into the blinding present, no matter how painful, or, to await the detachment of hindsight – which, being less painful, is more objective?

In the literature of what we so inadequately call the Holocaust, there were prisoners who, possessed by the fear of oblivion, defied every danger by becoming chroniclers. In the ghettos and in the death camps, and even in the shadow of the flames of Birkenau and Treblinka, men scrounged paper and pencil to write down and preserve their daily existence in all its appalling horror. These precious documents were discovered buried in the ground or under mountains of ash.

Following the war and shortly after their liberation from Auschwitz or Buchenwald, some survivors felt the need to speak out. The world had to be told the truth – not only about their suffering but also about its own treachery. Others held their tongues, mostly because they did not have the strength to relive events that had been just about unbearable. And then too, let us be honest, people preferred not to hear what they had to say. It prevented them from clinging to their own certainties or, more simply, from eating well and sleeping in peace.

Thomas Buergenthal is among those who chose to wait. In his case, the long delay has been rich in human experience. He was already at the height of his career as a professor of law and as a judge before an international court when he decided to revisit his memories.

Is his testimony just one among many, similar to so many others? Well, yes and no. At first glance, all accounts seem to tell the same story. Sometimes we may even wonder whether it was the same German tormenter who abused, tortured, and killed the same Jew six million times. And yet, each story retains its own identity, its own voice.

The voice of the future world court judge strikes us by its need to seek out strains of humanity, even in the very depths of hell.

Kielce, Henryków, Birkenau, Gliwice and Sachsenhausen – Buergenthal was among the youngest of prisoners in all these places of pain and damnation, where the power of evil and death seemed absolute. Being a mere ten years old in Birkenau made him a rarity, if not almost unique. How did he escape the brutality of the bosses, the agonies of hunger, the fatal diseases, and the selections? More simply put, how did he survive? If he believed in God, he might have evoked divine intervention, but he attributes his survival to luck. As a matter of fact, a clairvoyant had predicted as much to his mother: her son would be lucky. He remembers her saying so.

In the beginning there was the ghetto, with its famished wraiths, its nights of fear, its defeats; profession, wealth, and lineage counted for nothing there. Inside the primal nightmare, a most orderly chaos.

Then, deportation: the nocturnal passage into the unknown. Was it simply by chance that Thomas avoided the scrutiny of the infamous Doctor Mengele upon his arrival at Birkenau? Was there a tangible explanation for his luck? On another occasion, during a selection, the boy was bold enough to announce in German to a commandant that he could work. Amazingly, the commandant pulled him from the group destined for death. Other boys his age had already gone to ‘the other place,’ up there in the clouds, whereas he, Thomas, was still alive. One day, he was astonished to catch a glimpse of his mother in the women’s camp.

How can those who have never been put to the test understand how human nature may bend under duress? Why does one man become a pitiless Kapo and victimise an old friend or even his own relative? What makes one man choose to exercise power through cruelty, while another – from exactly the same background – refuses to do so in the name of enfeebled and downtrodden humanity?

Thomas watches, learns, and remembers. Firing squads. Hangings. The prisoner who, not wishing to lose his dignity, kisses the hand of the unfortunate friend condemned to serve as his executioner.

In fact, even in the terrible camp at Sachsenhausen, Thomas finds friends – older than him, men from his own district or from faraway places like Norway – who help him.

Thomas’s stories from the days following liberation resemble earlier accounts in their thirst to understand what man, pushed to the very limits, is capable of.

As a child in Göttingen, Germany, he dreamed of going out onto the balcony with a machine gun in his hand to seek vengeance. Later, that dream shamed and humbled him. The same townsmen who, under Hitler, had turned their backs on their Jewish neighbours now embrace them. And Thomas, who has come to Göttingen to be with his mother, does not judge them collectively guilty.

Would he have written the same book fifty years ago? There is no knowing. But he has written it. That alone is what matters. And for it the reader must surely be thankful to him.

Elie Wiesel

Preface

This book should probably have been written many years ago, when the events I describe were still fresh in my mind. But my other life intervened – the life I have lived since I arrived in the United States in 1951, a life filled with educational, professional and family responsibilities that left little time for the past. It may be also that I needed the distance of more than half a century to record my earlier life, for it allowed me to examine my childhood experiences with greater detachment and without dwelling on many details that are not really central to the story I now believe it is important to tell. That story, after all, continues to have a lasting impact on the person I have become.

Of course, I always knew that some day I would have to tell it to my children and then my grandchildren. I believe it is important for them to know what it was like to be a child in the Holocaust and to have survived the concentration camps. My children had heard snippets of my story at the dinner table and family gatherings, but never the whole story. Mine is not, after all, a story that lends itself to such occasional telling. But it is a story that must be told and passed on, particularly in a family that was for all practical purposes wiped out in the Holocaust. Only thus can the link between the past and the future be reestablished for our family. For example I have never really managed to tell my children, in its proper context, about the strength of character displayed by their grandparents at a time when other people in similar circumstances lost their moral compass completely. Their courage and integrity enrich the history of our family, and must not be buried with me.

I also wanted to present my story to a wider audience, not because I think that my early life was especially noteworthy in the greater scheme of things, but because I have long believed that the Holocaust cannot be fully understood unless viewed through the eyes of those who lived through it. To speak of the Holocaust in terms of a number – 6 million – which is the way it is usually done, is unintentionally to dehumanise the victims and to trivialise the profoundly human tragedy it was. The number transforms the victims into a fungible mass of nameless, soulless bodies rather than the individuals they were. Each of us who lived through the Holocaust has a personal story worth telling, if only because it puts a human face on the experience. Like all tragedies, the Holocaust produced its heroes and villains, ordinary human beings who never lost their humanity and those who, to save themselves or for a mere piece of bread, helped send others to the gas chambers. It is also the story of some Germans who, in the midst of the carnage, did not lose their humanity.

For me, the individual story of each survivor is a valuable addition to the Holocaust’s history. It deepens our understanding of this cataclysmic event that destroyed for ever not only European Jewry as such, but also its unique culture and character. That is why I have tried to write my own account from the perspective of the child I was, not as an old man reflecting on that life, and to retain its character as the contemporaneous personal testimony of one child-survivor.

This book contains my recollections of events that took place more than six decades ago. These recollections are, I am sure, coloured by the tricks that the passage of time and old age play on memory: forgotten or inaccurate names of people; muddled facts and dates of events that took place either earlier or later than recounted; and references to events that did not happen quite as I describe them or that I believe I witnessed, but may only have heard about. Because I did not write this book earlier, I could no longer consult those who were with me in the camps and compare my recollections of specific events with theirs, and I regret that very much. Most of all I regret that I could not discuss the details with my mother. Also, despite my best efforts, I have found it difficult, if not impossible, particularly in the book’s first two chapters, to distinguish clearly between some events I actually remember witnessing and those I was told about by my parents or overheard them discuss. All I can say is that as I wrote about them, I seemed to remember them clearly as first-hand experiences.

Similarly, although the chapters are organised in chronological order, the episodes within them may not be. After all these years, I can recall particular events or episodes, frequently very clearly, but not exactly when they occurred. To the child I was, dates or time had little significance. As I try to recall that period of my life, I realise that I did not think in terms of days, months or even years, as I would today. I grew up in the camps, I knew no other life, and my sole objective was to stay alive, from hour to hour, from day to day. That was my mindset. I measured time only in terms of the hours we had to wait to receive our next meal or the days remaining before Dr Mengele would mount another of his deadly selections. For example when I began writing I had no idea in which month of 1944 I arrived in Auschwitz. (I obtained that information only after consulting the Auschwitz archives.) The internet provided me with the date of my liberation from Sachsenhausen and that of the liquidation of the ghetto of Kielce. This is the extent of my research; the rest of the story is based on my own recollections.

Had I written this book in the mid-1950s, when I made a first attempt to tell part of my story by publishing an account of the Auschwitz Death March in a college literary magazine, this memoir would have conveyed a greater sense of immediacy to the events I describe. Back then, unencumbered by the mellowing impact that the passage of time has on memory, particularly painful memories, I could still vividly recall my fear of dying, the hunger I experienced, the sense of loss and insecurity that gripped me on being separated from my parents, and my reactions to the horrors I witnessed. Time and the life I have lived since then have dulled those feelings and emotions. As an author I regret that, for I am sure the reader would have been interested in that side of the story as well. But I am convinced that if these feelings and emotions had not lost some of their intensity over the years I would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to overcome my past without serious psychological scarring. It may have been my salvation that these memories faded over time.

My childhood experience has had a substantial impact on the human being I have become, on my life as an international law professor, human rights lawyer and international judge. It might seem obvious that my past would draw me to human rights and to international law, whether or not I knew it at the time. In any event, it equipped me to be a better human rights lawyer, if only because I understood, not only intellectually but also emotionally, what it is like to be a victim of human rights violations. I could, after all, feel it in my bones.

Chapter 1

From Lubochna to Poland

It was January 1945. Our open railcars offered little protection against the cold, the wind and the snow so typical of the harsh winters of eastern Europe. We were crossing Czechoslovakia on our way from Auschwitz in Poland to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. As our train approached a bridge spanning the tracks I saw people waving from the parapet and then, suddenly, loaves of bread came raining down on us. The bread kept coming as we passed under one or two more bridges. Except for snow, I had eaten nothing since we had boarded the train at the end of a three-day forced march out of Auschwitz, only a few days ahead of the advancing Soviet troops. The bread probably saved my life and the lives of many others who were with me on what came to be known as the Auschwitz Death Transport.

At the time, it did not occur to me to connect the bread from the bridges with Czechoslovakia, the country of my birth. That came years after the war, usually recalled on those occasions when, for one reason or another, I was asked to present a birth certificate. Since I did not have one, I would be required to provide an affidavit, attesting, ‘on information and belief’, that I was born in Lubochna, Czechoslovakia, on 11 May 1934. Whenever I signed one of these documents, I would invariably have a flashback to those Czech bridges.

In the early 1990s, not long after the communist regime collapsed in Czechoslovakia, I finally managed to obtain my birth certificate. It confirmed what I had claimed in my many affidavits and provided the impetus for a visit by my wife Peggy and me to Lubochna, she out of curiosity to see where I was born and I in order to connect with that one piece of land on earth where I first opened my eyes.

We reached Lubochna, a small resort town in the lower Tatra mountains in today’s Slovakia, after driving from Bratislava, the capital, for a few hours on winding roads alongside noisy brooks and meandering rivers. By chance, we arrived in Lubochna in May 1991, almost fifty-seven years to the day after my birth there. A beautifully sunny morning greeted us as we drove into this small town surrounded by inviting, mellow mountains which distinguish the lower Tatras from the harsher High Tatras.

Now I understood why my father had dreamed of one day coming back to Lubochna and why my mother had loved it here. It seemed such an idyllic place. As Peggy and I walked through the streets in the hope of finding what used to be my parents’ hotel, I realised that, although the official-looking piece of paper I had would forever link me to Lubochna, nothing else did. We never found the hotel – I later learned that it had been demolished some time in the 1960s. Although my visit confirmed to me that Lubochna was truly the beautiful place my parents frequently talked about, I acknowledged with considerable sadness that for my family and me this town represented little more than an historical footnote in a story that began here with the joy brought on by the birth of a child, a joy that gradually gave way to what eventually turned out to be a very different tale.

My father, Mundek Buergenthal, had moved to Lubochna from Germany shortly before Hitler came to power in 1933. Together with a friend, Erich Godal, an anti-Nazi political cartoonist working for a major Berlin daily, they decided to open a small hotel in Lubochna, where Godal owned some property. The political situation in Germany was becoming ever more perilous for Jews and for those who opposed Hitler and the ideology of his National Socialist Party. My father and Godal apparently also believed that the German people’s enthusiasm for Hitler would wane in a few years and that they would then be able to return to Berlin. In the meantime, the proximity of Czechoslovakia to Germany would allow them to follow developments back home more closely and enable them to provide temporary refuge to any of their friends who might have to leave Germany in a hurry.

My father was born in 1901 in Galicia, a region of Poland that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War. German and Polish were the languages in which he received his primary and much of his secondary education. His parents lived on a farm that belonged to a wealthy Polish landowner whose extensive estate was administered by my paternal grandfather, an unusual occupation for a Jew at that time in that part of the world. The Polish landowner had been my grandfather’s commanding officer in the Austrian army and took him into his service when both returned to civilian life. Eventually he put my grandfather in charge of his many farms.

The nearest school was in a town some distance away. Family lore has it that, to get there, my father was for a time boarded at the home of the flagman in charge of a strategically located level crossing. Trains to and from the town would pass the crossing daily. Since there was no train station nearby, the flagman would slow the train down in the morning and again in the afternoon so that my father might jump on and off. Less hazardous arrangements were later made for him to attend school.

After graduating from high school and a brief stint in the Polish army during the Russo-Polish war which began in 1919, my father enrolled in the law school of the University of Krakow. Before completing his studies, however, he left Poland and moved to Berlin. There he joined his older sister, who was married to a well-known Berlin couturier, and obtained a job with a private Jewish bank. He rose rapidly, becoming an officer of the bank at a relatively young age following his success in helping to manage the bank’s investment portfolio. His position at the bank and his brother-in-law’s social contacts enabled him to meet many Berlin-based writers, journalists and actors. The rise of Hitler and the ever increasing attacks by his followers on Jews and anti-Nazi intellectuals, quite a number of whom were friends of my father, prompted him to leave Germany and settle in Lubochna.

Gerda Silbergleit, my mother, or Mutti to me, arrived at my father’s hotel in 1933. She had travelled from Göttingen, the German university town where she was born and where her parents owned a shoe store. Not quite twenty-one years old at the time – she was born in 1912 – her parents had sent her to Lubochna in the hope that a vacation in Czechoslovakia would help her forget the non-Jewish boyfriend who wanted to marry her. They also thought that it would be good for their daughter to leave Göttingen for a while. There the harassment of Jews – and, in particular, of young Jewish women – by Nazi youths roaming the streets was making life increasingly unpleasant for her.

When making arrangements for my mother’s stay at the hotel, her parents asked that she be met at the German border. Instead of sending his driver, my father decided to drive alone to the border, where he gave her the impression that he was the hotel’s chauffeur. She was quite embarrassed at dinner to find herself seated at the table of the hotel’s owner, the very same driver she had quizzed about Mr Buergenthal, whom her mother had described as a very eligible bachelor. Years later, whenever I heard my mother tell this story, I wondered whether her visit to Lubochna had been arranged by her parents with a possible marriage to my father in mind, and whether, if there was such a plan, my father knew of it. Was it just a coincidence that his hotel was recommended to my mother’s parents by a friend who also knew my father well? I never did find out. To my mother, it was always love at first sight, and that was it!

That may well be true, for my parents were engaged three days after they met, and married a few weeks later, though not before my maternal grandparents, Paul and Rosa Silbergleit (née Blum), had travelled to Lubochna to pass judgement on the prospective bridegroom. They were apparently somewhat taken aback by the rapidity of the engagement and the hasty marriage, but in the Europe of 1933 there was little time for courting. I was born eleven months later. By 1939 we were refugees on the run, only a few steps ahead of the Germans – a whole country, it seemed, had declared war on a family of three whose only crime was that they were Jews.

As I search my memory for some aspects of my brief life in Lubochna, I have a hard time separating what my parents told me from what I actually remember. My guess is that much of what I think I remember from that period I actually heard later from either my father or mother. My mother frequently recalled that I served as her interpreter at the age of three or four when she went shopping in Slovakia. She spoke only German and the shopkeepers for the most part only Slovak. I could apparently get along in both languages. We spoke German at home when all three of us were together, and I must have picked up Slovak from my Slovak nannies.

My only clear recollection of life in Lubochna dates back to a day in late 1938 or early 1939, when my parents told me that we had to leave our hotel. As they began to pack our belongings, they appeared to be very much in a hurry. Years later I was told that the Hlinka Guard, the fascist party that controlled Slovakia with the support of Nazi Germany, claimed to have a court order declaring one of its front organisations the owners of our hotel. (My parents had purchased Erich Godal’s share in the hotel some years earlier.) There was no way to challenge this confiscation of our home: by that time, the Hlinka Guard and its followers controlled the courts, and their police threatened to expel us from the country if we resisted their takeover and failed to leave Lubochna immediately.

As a result, we could take only a few suitcases with us, leaving everything else, in addition to the hotel itself, to the new ‘owners’. But I wanted my car to come with us! It was a little red car with pedals. I was reassured that we would soon be back and that it would be waiting for me on our return. That car was my most treasured possession. I must have sensed that I would never see it again, for I went to the storeroom to say goodbye to it. There it was, propped up on its rear wheels, leaning against a post, surrounded by boxes and suitcases. It looked as sad as I felt. To this day, when I think back to that moment, I can still see my little red car.

After leaving Lubochna we lived for a time in Zilina, also in Slovakia. At first we stayed with friends who owned the Grand Hotel there. I remember the name because I had a wonderful time standing at its main entrance with one of the doormen and, as was then the custom, calling out ‘Grand Hotel!’ to passers-by. They would frequently engage me in conversation and, to my delight, sometimes even toss me a coin.

From the hotel we moved to a small apartment. Here my mother and I were often alone. My father had found a job as a travelling salesman for a medical-instrument company and spent a lot of time visiting customers in different parts of the country. My parents had apparently used most of their savings, including the money my mother had received from her parents as dowry, to enlarge the hotel and to buy out their former partner. Now the hotel was gone and with it the income they had depended on.

While we lived in Lubochna, Mutti had never had to cook. That was done by the hotel’s chef, a massive and intimidating Slovak matron, who let my father know in no uncertain terms that his young wife was not welcome in her kitchen. Now, in Zilina, things were different and I soon realised that my mother was not a very good cook. Once she roasted a chicken without gutting it properly and my father ended up with a mouthful of corn, which must have been the remains of the chicken’s last meal. Of course, he spat it all out and they had a big fight. ‘I thought they taught you something at that finishing school in Göttingen!’ screamed my father. Mutti counter-attacked by reminding him of some long-forgotten incident for which he was supposedly to blame. And when he replied that that had nothing to do with her inability to cook, she accused him of changing the subject. I soon understood that she would always win these arguments, while he would end up shaking his head in disbelief. At times she would make me her co-conspirator. Once, when she discovered that the kitchen rag she had been looking for had fallen into the pot with our evening meal, she swore me to secrecy and assured me that ‘Papa will not notice anything if we don’t tell.’

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. My mother protested that we could not leave without my father, but to no avail. We were taken to the police station. Its building and courtyard were already filled with other foreigners. My mother recognised some of our friends among them. People were sitting on their suitcases, children were crying, and I sensed that everybody was very afraid, just as I was.

As soon as we arrived at the police station my mother, in her precise, clipped German, demanded to see the person in charge. She made a tremendous amount of noise while waving a leather-bound document with a lot of stamps on it. After a few minutes we were taken into an office. Here a heavyset man in uniform, who was not very friendly, asked in a threatening tone of voice what all the commotion was about and who she thought she was. My mother, who seemed very tall to me at that moment, but who measured slightly less than five feet, slammed her document on the man’s desk and barked at him in German, ‘We are Germans!’ Pointing to the document on the desk, which she told him was her passport, she continued in that same tone, ‘We are supposed to be your allies! It is an outrage that you are treating us like common criminals.’ She wanted to be taken to the German consul immediately to protest this scandalous treatment, and she warned the police official that he and his superiors were going to be in very serious trouble with the German authorities for molesting Germans living peacefully in Slovakia. ‘Just you wait and see what will happen when my husband comes back and does not find us at home!’

After a whispered conversation with another man and some further inspection of the passport, the officer suddenly smiled at us, got up from behind his desk, grasped my mother’s hand and, in broken German, apologised to her profusely. This was all a big mistake; of course they were not deporting Germans living in Slovakia, only foreign Jews and other undesirables who should not have been allowed into the country in the first place. He shook my mother’s hand again, saluted and ordered a policeman to escort us home.