Book Review : A Lucky Child by Thomas Beurgenthal

Thomas Beurgenthal- born May 11, 1934 in Lubochna Czechoslovaka. His parents Mudek & Gerda Beurgenthal .

Thomas and his family living in Lubochna are made to pack up and move out of their hotel, ending up in a small apartment in Zilina. Thomas's father found a job as a traveling salesman so that left Thomas and his mother home alone. One day the police came to the door and ordered them to pack their belongings. They were told that the Jews were being expelled from the country. Thomas's mother demanded to talk to the chief of police and told him that they were Germans, showing him her passport, which was a Germans drivers license. The chief ordered the police to escort them home.
Deciding it was to dangerous to continue to live there, they decided to move to Poland.

One day his mother came home very excited. She had visited a fortune teller who told her about her family and that her son was "ein Gluckskind" - A Lucky Child .
But on their lucky day Hitler invades Poland and this is the start of Thomas's remarkable struggle to survival story begins.

When reading his story, my stomach was in knots . I have a hard time reading about the Holocaust, such a horrendous crime. Thomas does a wonderful job , detailing his time in the camps, how he was able to survive day to day . I wanted to cry and hug him and make his hurt go away. It was a fascinating read and I highly recommend it.

I found this site: Life After the Holocaust.

About the Author - From Wikipedia:


Biography
Thomas Buergenthal, born to German-Jewish parents who had moved from Germany to Czechoslovakia in 1933, grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Kielce (Poland) and later in the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen. After the War he lived with his mother in Göttingen. On 4 December 1951, he emigrated from Germany to the United States. He studied at Bethany College in West Virginia (graduated 1957), and received his J.D. at New York University Law School in 1960, and his LL.M. and S.J.D. degrees in international law from Harvard Law School.
Buergenthal is a specialist in international law and human rights law. Since 2000, he has served as a judge on the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Prior to his election to the International Court of Justice, he was the Lobingier Professor of Comparative Law and Jurisprudence at The George Washington University Law School. He was Dean of Washington College of Law of American University from 1980 to 1985, and held endowed professorships at the University of Texas and Emory University. Buergenthal served as a judge for many years, including lengthy periods on various specialized international bodies. Between 1979 and 1991, he served as a judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, including a stint as that court's president; from 1989 to 1994, he was a judge on the Inter-American Development Bank's Administrative Tribunal; in 1992 and 1993, he served on the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador; and from 1995 to 1999, he was a member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
Buergenthal is the author of more than a dozen books and a large number of articles on international law, human rights and comparative law subjects.
Judge Buergenthal is a co-recipient of the 2008 Gruber Prize for Justice for his contributions to the promotion and protection of human rights in different parts of the world, and particularly in Latin America.[1]
His memoir, "A Lucky Child" which describes his experience in various German concentration camps has been translated into ten languages.

Video from Amazon

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Tuesday Teaser is from the book A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal

Page 100: "I asked one of the orderlies what had been done to me, and he said that two of my toes had been amputated. I did not believe him and decided to see for myself."


I ran across this creative video. How did they do that??

Its Friday Musings................

Finally its Friday. Its been a long week.

My mailbox was busy this week. I received two books:

Elemental Shaman : One Mans Journey into the Heart of Humanity, Spirituality and Ecology.

The back of the book:
This fascinating true story chronicles one man's journey into the mysteries of spiritual consciousness and the indegenous healing practices of four shamanistic traditions: Toltec, Cherokee, Maya and Buddhist. In his travels around the globe, Rosales witnesses the powerful channeled spirit Nino Fidencio, recieves messages and healing from a Toltec shaman, and experiences a dramatic soul retrieval from a Cherokee spiritwalker. Rosales travesls to Guatemal, where he meets a mayan high priestess and the secret brotherhoods called cofradias, whose mission is to guard Maximon, the last living Mayan god. Rosales's last journey is to Bhutan, the Land of the Thunder Dragon, where he spends time with a holy lama.


A Lucky Child by Thomas Beurgenthal.

From Amazon:
From Publishers Weekly
Not many children who entered Auschwitz lived to tell the tale. The American judge at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, Czechoslovakia-born Buergenthal, is one of the few. A 10-year-old inmate in August 1944 at Birkenau, Buergenthal was one of the death camp's youngest prisoners. He miraculously survived, thanks, among others, to a friendly kapo who made him an errand boy. Buergenthal's authentic, moving tale reveals that his lifelong commitment to human rights sprang from the ashes of Auschwitz. 16 b&w photos, 1 map. (Apr. 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


I'm still reading The Anatomy of Wings By Karen Foxlee.

From Amazon starred reviewer:
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Set in a small Australian town in the early 1980s, this shining debut novel charts a young girl’s grief after the death of her older sister. Months before Beth’s fatal fall, 10-year-old Jennifer’s beautiful singing voice disappears. When and why it “got stuck” forms a central mystery that unifies Jennifer’s narrative, which loops fluidly between past and present. Each clue leads back to events from the tumultuous year before Beth died, and Jennifer’s search for her voice becomes a larger search for how her beloved sister was lost and what it means to leave childhood behind. In this sensitive, original story, Foxlee explores familiar elements: the warmth and suffocation of living in “Nowheresville”; the chasm of misunderstanding between parents and adolescent children. Jennifer loves the comfort and solidity of facts, and she collects information like currency, but her observations are also poetic and washed with magic realism. Not all the plot’s tangents are well integrated, but the story works as memory does, with skips, gaps, and sudden, piercing moments that are as illogical and illuminating as a dream. With heart-stopping accuracy and sly symbolism, Foxlee captures the small ways that humans reveal themselves, the mysterious intensity of female adolescence, and the surreal quiet of a grieving house, which slowly and with astonishing resilience fills again with sound and music. Grades 8-12. --Gillian Engberg

I'm enjoying my reading this week.

I also came across the New York Times article about Yann Martels new book coming out in sometime next year . One of my favorite books of all time was Life of Pi so i'm looking forward to reading his new book.

Park-Avenue Princess is doing a contest for this bracelet.
Its so cool, i had to enter!

Well thats all for now. May post more later.

One more thing, Dina of Just Another New Blog - just sent me a winning email! I won The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly!

Have a great week and happy reading!




**** Just note that i won a "quickie" contest put on by Beth from Beths Book Review - "My Forbidden Desire" -- Ooohhh sounds hot !!LOL! Thanks so much Beth!


Best regards,

Just Won!!!!

Wanted to say thank you to True Crime Book Reviews for choosing me as the winner of this book A Lucky Child by Thomas Beurgenthal, Elie Wiesel! Can't wait to read it!!