IN THE SIX DECADES since the end of the Second World War and my liberation, I have often wondered why or how I managed to survive the camps. These reflections are not brought on by feelings of remorse that I survived while so many others did not. Rather, my focus has been on the circumstances that allowed me to survive. If there is one word that captures the conclusion to which I always returned, it is luck. But luck is only the shorthand expression for a combination of factors that allowed me to make it. There was first the fact that during the ghetto and work camp periods in Kielce, I was together with my mother and father, who not only cared for me but also engrained in me the essentials of survival. Early on in Auschwitz, after I had already been separated from my mother, my father and I were still together. That allowed him to continue to protect me and to instruct me on ways to avoid ending up in the gas chamber. Of course, the fact that I was able to enter Auschwitz without being subjected to the deadly selection process on arrival was a major piece of luck. Had there been a selection, I would never have made it into the camp, and that would have been the end of my story.
Once I was alone in Auschwitz and later on in Sachsenhausen, it helped that by then I was a little older and had become a true child of the camps in the sense that I had learned the tricks I needed to survive. I use the phrase “child of the camps” advisedly, because I have always felt that in many ways my survival instincts had much in common with similar traits I have observed in the “street children” of Latin America, who daily face many dangers and deprivations. These kids are frequently as young as I was or even younger. I point to these children when friends express surprise on learning how young I was. Children, even relatively young children, learn to be cunning or street-smart when circumstances demand, and they are fast learners when they have to be in order to live another day. When my own children were of the age I was during the war, I frequently wondered whether these pampered American children or the children of my friends could have made it in circumstances similar to mine. I am convinced that with some luck they could have, because the survival instinct in children is strong enough to allow them to adjust to the needs of their environment. Of course, what helped me was that I had a relatively long period of survival training. Who knows whether I would have survived had I arrived in Auschwitz from a normal middle-class environment and immediately had to face the brutal camp conditions. It was luck again that I had a gradual immersion into hell. (As I write these words I am not unaware of the bizarre use of the word luck, but that is what it was in its context.)
For my survival, I suppose it also helped that I spoke fluent, unaccented German and Polish and did not look Jewish. My German helped me on a number of occasions, as did my Aryan features; at least, that is what I think. Maybe I reminded some of the Nazi officers of their own children. This may have been a factor in the decision of the camp commandant of Kielce to let me live after I told him that I could work. Being able to speak Polish also proved useful on numerous occasions. Together, these things no doubt played a role in my survival and were entirely fortuitous.
At times I have been asked whether I ever suffered from the so-called survivor syndrome that allegedly afflicts some survivors who torment themselves for surviving when so many others, particularly members of their families, did not. Survivor syndrome has apparently driven some survivors to suicide and left others with serious psychological problems. I have never experienced these feelings. I don’t know why, but if I were to speculate, I would attribute their absence to the instinctive belief of children in their immortality and their entitlement to live. It may also be that since I attributed my survival to sheer luck, I came to view survival and nonsurvival as a game of chance over which I had no control and was, therefore, not responsible for the outcome. How else to explain the fact that I did not catch diphtheria, even though I slept in the same bunk as my friend who came down with that very contagious disease? It could be argued, of course, that my reliance on luck to explain my survival is itself a defense mechanism against the mental ravages survivor syndrome is known to visit on survivors. And yet, it is no doubt true that luck had a great deal to do with my survival.
Thomas in Auschwitz Birkenau, fiftyfive years after the infamous death march
I have also wondered from time to time why I can speak and write very freely and, on the whole, unemotionally about my camp experiences, while I am unable to watch movies about the Holocaust or read books that deal with it. That is not to say that in writing this memoir, I did not have moments when I had to compose myself before going on. For example, when describing the reunion with my mother or the killing of Ucek and Zarenka, tears welled up in my eyes. Generally, however, the story just flowed out of me. And though before starting on this book, I was afraid that some of my Auschwitz nightmares might return as I began to recall seemingly longforgotten episodes, that did not happen. By contrast, when my children asked my mother to write down some of her Holocaust experiences, she started to write but had to stop after the first few pages. She told them afterward that almost as soon as she began to write, she started to cry and could not continue. Yet she could speak quite freely about these events. How to explain these quirks of the mind? Of course, the Holocaust robbed her of the best years of her life, and while she lived a relatively comfortable life after the war, it certainly was not the normal happy life she would otherwise have had or assumed she would have had. As she began to write down her war experiences for her grandchildren, the suppressed feelings about her loss no doubt reemerged. My own past did not really affect my future to the same degree.
Nevertheless, my camp experience has had much to do with my later professional life. Unlike most of my law school classmates, I was never really interested in the traditional practice of law, that is, in doing what lawyers do in most countries: defending or prosecuting criminals, representing clients in civil disputes, dealing with domestic relations matters, or otherwise providing legal advice to individuals and companies. Instead, I was drawn to international law and to international human rights law, as that branch of international law came to be known, because I believed, somewhat naively at first, that these areas of the law, if developed and strengthened, could spare future generations the type of terrible human tragedies that Nazi Germany had visited on the world.
Over time I also gradually concluded that I had an obligation to devote my professional activities to the international protection of human rights. This sense of obligation had its source in the belief, which grew stronger as the years passed, that those of us who survived the Holocaust owe it to those who perished in it to try to improve, each in our own way, the lives of others. To me that meant working for a world in which the rights and dignity of human beings everywhere would be protected. I also convinced myself that the international law of human rights was a field to which I, as a lawyer and because of my Holocaust experience, would be able to make a more significant contribution than to any other branch of the law. After all, I knew what it meant to be a victim of human rights violations.
That my Holocaust experience is never entirely removed from my professional work was brought home to me while dealing with a complaint submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, on which I began to serve in 1995, by Robert Faurisson, a French denier of the Holocaust. Having been convicted by French courts for the violation of a French law making Holocaust denial a criminal offense, Faurisson challenged his conviction and the French law in a complaint filed with the Human Rights Committee. Given my personal history, I decided to remove myself from hearing the case. I did so with the following declaration: “As a survivor of the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, whose father, maternal grandparents, and many other family members were killed in the Nazi Holocaust, I have no choice but to recuse myself from participating in the decision of this case.”
Before joining the Human Rights Committee, I had served on two major international human rights bodies: the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the U.N. Truth Commission for El Salvador. In many ways, they turned out to be my most exciting and productive human rights activities. The first of these began in 1979 with my election as judge of the newly created Inter-American Court of Human Rights of the Organization of American States. I remained on the Court, a part-time institution modeled on the old European Court of Human Rights, for the maximum two six-year terms and served as its president for the usual two-year period.
During the time I served on the Court, much of Latin America was ruled by military regimes and civilian dictators who were responsible for massive violations of human rights. While this was not a political climate in which a human rights court could count on the sympathetic support of many governments in the region, the Court was nevertheless able to lay a relatively solid foundation for the enforcement in the Western Hemisphere of the rights guaranteed by the American Convention. Our most important achievement during my time on the Court was the first ever international judgment holding a state — Honduras — liable for practicing a policy of forced disappearances. The government of Honduras was ordered to pay damages to the families of the victims and, what is more, fully complied with the judgment.
The Court’s authority had been severely tested, however, in dealing with the Honduran Disappearance Cases. After testifying against the government, our first witness was murdered on a street of his hometown in Honduras. Another person whom the Court had decided to call as a witness became the next victim, under similar circumstances, before he ever had a chance to testify. To our relief, the killings of witnesses stopped as soon as the Court issued an injunction ordering the government of Honduras to ensure the safety of our witnesses, potential witnesses, and the next of kin of the victims of the disappearances. Our concern that the killing of witnesses would continue despite the injunction, with the government denying all responsibility, proved not to be justified.
During my time on the Court, we rendered important decisions relating to freedom of speech, the protection of human rights during national emergencies, due process of law, and related subjects. All in all, because of my interest in strengthening the development of international human rights law and institutions, I found my service on the Inter-American Court a dream come true. It is one thing to theorize about solutions to these problems but quite another to achieve concrete results that strengthen the protection of human rights.
The role that the Inter-American Court could play at the time was severely limited by the fact that some of the most serious violators of human rights in the region — among them Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and various Central American countries — had either not ratified the American Convention or had not accepted the jurisdiction of the Court. These states could consequently not be brought before the Court. Thus, while we could hear charges against Honduras, which was alleged to have been responsible for some two hundred forced disappearances, we lacked that power for Argentina which, it was claimed, was responsible for between fifteen thousand and thirty thousand forced disappearances during its so-called dirty war. The fact that international human rights courts, international criminal courts, and similar bodies have jurisdiction over only those states that accept their jurisdiction, means that states that have not done so enjoy the very impunity these tribunals are designed to end. Sad, but unfortunately true. That is why it is so important, in my opinion, that all states become parties to the Rome Treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, and why I believe that the United States should ratify it. By not joining, the U.S. government is sending the wrong message to the international community about its commitment to the international rule of law.
As my service as judge on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights was coming to an end, the secretary-general of the United Nations appointed me to the three-member United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador. Our charge was to investigate the massive violations of human rights that had been committed during El Salvador’s twelve-year civil war, which had finally come to an end a few months earlier. Until then, I had always believed that my Holocaust experience had prepared me to deal with even the most egregious violations of human rights. In El Salvador, I found this not to be true. To see the skeleton of a baby still in the womb of a mother killed in the El Mozote massacre, where some five hundred women, children, and old men had been murdered, was more than I could take without being deeply affected by the utter depravity of those who committed this and similar crimes.
On entering the corridor of the residence of a group of Jesuit priests in San Salvador, I was shown the portrait of Archbishop Romero, a bullet hole near his heart. This symbolic reenactment of the archbishop’s murder some years earlier was the work of the Salvadoran soldiers who, a few minutes later, went on to execute the priests and their housekeeper in the garden of their residence. The murdered priests’ only “crime,” I learned later, had been their desire to help negotiate a truce between the military and the guerrillas, something the leadership of the military feared. In El Salvador, we heard again and again that “orders are orders,” and when we asked some of the military officers and the guerrilla commanders why they had committed or ordered this or that killing, we were invariably told that it was “un error,” a mistake. Never once during our interrogations did I hear expressions of remorse or admissions of guilt; mistakes yes, guilt no. How to explain that the intentional act of the killing of an innocent human being can be written off as merely a “mistake”?
El Salvador was a country in which many lived in fear. In this atmosphere, the victims or their next of kin often did not dare to speak about what had happened to them. People kept their suffering to themselves, hoping for justice but not really expecting it. For some people, ten years or more had gone by in silence with pent-up anger about the past. Finally someone — the commission — was listening to them, and the mere fact of telling what had happened was a healing emotional release. I was surprised to realize that despite their terrible experiences, most of our witnesses were more interested in recounting their stories than in seeking retribution.
One interview among many others comes to mind in this connection. It involved two women, one Salvadoran and the other either Swedish or Danish. They had come to the commission together to tell the story of their children. The son of one of the witnesses and the daughter of the other had met in Europe and had fallen in love. The couple traveled to El Salvador, became involved in leftist political activities, and were murdered by the military. Their mothers had not met until they decided to testify before the Truth Commission. They told us that they wanted to honor the memory of their children by telling their story together.
During our work in El Salvador, memories of my own past in another part of the world returned to me over and over again as we interviewed witnesses, heard their stories, and inspected the killing fields. The suffering that so many people in that small country had endured during its terrible civil war will remain forever imprinted on my soul. While in El Salvador, I often wondered whether the fact that I, with my Holocaust background, was investigating these crimes had some symbolic significance. Was it that these activities and my human rights work generally gave special meaning to my survival or that my survival compelled me, whether I knew it or not, to pursue these activities?
In the late 1990s, I found myself serving on the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland. The CRT, as this tribunal came to be known, was set up to search for unclaimed Holocaust-related bank accounts and to help identify their owners or heirs. As its vice chairman, I had to supervise the CRT’s day-to-day operations and to adjudicate claims submitted to us. In reading the claimants’ applications and the bank files, my thoughts took me back to the 1930s, when some wealthy European Jews, vaguely sensing the fate that awaited them with the rise of the Nazis, sought to protect their money in neutral Switzerland. Many of them did not survive the Holocaust. That benefited the Swiss banks, which used the funds for more than half a century without ever accounting or expecting to account for their windfall.
Working with a group of commercial arbitrators from Israel, Switzerland, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Belgium, and a support staff of some twenty young lawyers, our job consisted of trying to determine whether the information provided us by individual claimants about deceased account holders matched the information found in the files of the Swiss banks. It was no easy task. Frequently, all we had to work with was the name of the account holder and, at most, a hometown or a profession. While I tried not to let my anger at the conduct of some banks affect the job I had to do, it was not always easy. For example, there would be bank files that contained nothing but the name of the account holder, the amount of money remaining in the account, and a notation that all other information had been discarded. Not only did the banks not pay interest, they frequently depleted the accounts entirely by deducting bank fees long after they must have known that the depositors had perished in the Holocaust. There was evidence, moreover, that some banks had told Holocaust survivors seeking information about the bank accounts of relatives that no such accounts existed in the branch the survivors had identified, when they knew full well that the accounts existed in other branches.
There was always great joy in our offices in Zurich when we were able to connect the account of a Holocaust victim to an heir, but there were also moments of sadness when we learned that an heir had died before we had been able to make a finding of entitlement. Many heirs of account holders were never found. A case I cannot forget concerned an account claimed by a man and a woman in their seventies, living in different countries, who each contended that they were the sole heir of the account holder. After reviewing the case file, one of our young lawyers came to see me. He reported that the two claimants appeared to be siblings and that each believed that the other had perished in the Holocaust. I examined the file and agreed with him. The entire office was alerted, and there was rejoicing all around: we had not only found the heirs to an account but would also be able to reunite a brother and sister! Because of the advanced age of the heirs, we decided that the good news should be conveyed to them very carefully and that the brother should be contacted first. When I saw the face of the young lawyer shortly after he had made the call, I could guess what had happened: the brother had died three months earlier without ever learning that his sister was alive.
As chairman of the Committee on Conscience of the Washington-based U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, it was my task to relate the experience of the Holocaust to contemporary realities by warning against new genocides and crimes against humanity. By the end of the mid-1990s, our optimistic assumptions that the world had seen the end of these crimes were belied by what was happening in Rwanda and in the Balkans. Before we had a chance to speak out and get the international community to act, hundreds of thousands of human beings had died. That was a familiar story to those of us who had survived the Holocaust. Although we worked very hard to get the international community to take action, that action often came too late, if at all, which only went to prove that we are still far from the day when “Never again!” really means what it is supposed to mean.
Over the years, contemporary events have triggered images in my mind of my camp experiences. During the Balkan conflict in the 1990s, for example, it was a common occurrence for TV stations to broadcast pictures of columns of exhausted refugees fleeing from combat zones. As I watched these scenes, I recognized myself in the frightened faces of the children. The pictures brought back memories of approaching German tanks on those Polish country roads, where our little group of refugees huddled in fear. When listening to the sole survivor of the El Mozote massacre, I was transported back to the liquidation of the Ghetto of Kielce and the shooting and screams that engulfed us as the sick and infirm were being murdered. At another point in El Salvador, while inspecting the courtyard of the residence where the Jesuit priests had been executed, I was told that the view of a distant observation tower that was relevant to my investigation was obscured by rosebushes planted in memory of the priests. As I tried to look through the rosebushes, they gave way in my mind to the images of the beautiful wildflowers I had seen a year earlier on a visit to Auschwitz. The flowers covered the once barren ground of the camp as if to hide the horrendous crimes that had been committed there, just as the roses in that Salvadoran courtyard seemed intent on covering up the murders of the innocent priests. A few years earlier in San José, Costa Rica, I had a somewhat similar experience while hearing the testimony being presented to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights about the torture and killings that had been committed in Honduras in connection with forced disappearances. As I listened to the witness, I found myself remembering the brutal beating of Spiegel in that barrack in Auschwitz, the killing of the young Poles who had been caught looting during the liquidation of the Ghetto of Kielce, and the beating and subsequent hanging of the prisoners who had tried to escape from the Henryków work camp.
These and similar experiences have frequently accompanied me in my human rights activities. They have forced me to reflect on what it is that allows or compels human beings to commit such cruel and brutal crimes. It frightens me terribly that the individuals committing these acts are for the most part not sadists, but ordinary people who go home in the evening to their families, washing their hands before sitting down to dinner, as if what they had been doing was just a job like any other. If we humans can so easily wash the blood of our fellow humans off our hands, then what hope is there for sparing future generations from a repeat of the genocides and mass killings of the past? Was the Holocaust merely a practice run for the next set of genocides of other groups of human beings? Of course, I am very troubled by these questions, especially when I hear of new atrocities being committed in one part of the world or another.
These reflections might turn me into a cynic or have the effect of making me give up on my human rights work. But they do not have that effect. While I do not believe that I survived the Holocaust in order to devote my life to the protection of human rights, I believe that, having survived, I have an obligation to try to do all I can to spare others, wherever they might be, from suffering a fate similar to that of the victims of the Holocaust. It should therefore not be a surprise to anyone that the terrible crimes and cruelties experienced by human beings in many parts of the world since the Holocaust do not weaken my commitment to human rights. Instead, they reinforce my belief in the need to work ever harder to promote human rights education on all levels and to strengthen international and national legal and political institutions capable of making it ever more difficult for governments to violate human rights.
I also consider it a mistake to assume, as some do, that no significant progress has been made since the Holocaust in protecting human rights. The large body of international human rights laws in existence today and the many institutions established to enforce them, while they have certainly not put an end to all genocides or crimes against humanity, have tended to prevent or reduce large-scale human rights violations in many parts of the world. Here I think, for example, of the end of Apartheid and the emergence of democratic regimes in Latin America and elsewhere. The demise of the Soviet Union with its gulags is, in part at least, attributable to massive international efforts to put an end to that repressive regime. And who would have dared to dream in the 1970s or 1980s that eastern Europe would now be part of a democratic Europe? Admittedly, much still remains to be done, but the fact that some progress, however slow, is being made suggests to me that to give up hope now on efforts to improve the human rights situation around the world would only increase the suffering of an ever greater number of human beings and leave them without any prospect for a better future.
I tend to believe that had our contemporary international human rights mechanisms and norms existed in the 1930s, they might well have saved many of the lives that were lost in the Holocaust. The vast numbers of United Nations and regional human rights treaties, declarations, and institutions have created an international climate that expects governments to protect human rights and has made it increasingly more difficult for them to defend policies that result in serious violations of human rights. These laws and institutions have in turn contributed to the growth of nongovernmental human rights organizations that alert the international community to serious human rights violations almost as soon as they occur. Some democratic governments have over the years also developed national policies and practices that promote human rights on the international level. All these efforts have been helped by the contemporary communications revolution, which permits news of human rights abuses and unattended natural catastrophes to be broadcast around the world in almost real time. Mankind’s yearning for human rights and human dignity has benefited from political and technological developments that gradually rob offending governments of the legitimacy and support they need to persist in violating human rights over the long term. That we can point to this or that government impervious to these developments proves no more than that progress is slow; it is equally true, though, that the number of such governments is decreasing, if only because in today’s world these governments frequently pay a heavy political and economic price for engaging in practices unacceptable to large segments of the international community.
None of the international human rights norms, mechanisms, or policies to which I have referred here existed in the 1930s. The international law of that period allowed governments almost unlimited freedom to mistreat their own citizens. Nonintervention in the internal affairs of a state was the norm. It not only protected offending governments against international pressure but also provided other governments with an excuse for their inaction. Hardly any international nongovernmental human rights organizations existed at the time, and the world’s media were neither equipped nor interested in stigmatizing violations of human rights. Today it is therefore easier than it was in the 1930s to arouse the international community to act. That does not mean that such action will always be forthcoming. But it does mean that we now have better tools than we had in the past to stop massive violations of human rights. The task ahead is to strengthen these tools, not to despair, and to never believe that mankind is incapable of creating a world in which our grandchildren and their descendants can live in peace and enjoy the human rights that were denied to so many of my generation.