Hanover
Many children, along with the sick and elderly, never made it farther: guards took them straight from the platform to the gas chamber. But Buergenthal was one of the lucky ones, if the term applies. For reasons he will never know, he was given a bunk.
In the winter of 1945, as the Red Army neared the concentration camp in Poland, Nazi soldiers roused the prisoners for what became known as the Auschwitz “death march.” Their free labor was needed back in Germany.
With loaves of hard bread in hand, Buergenthal and thousands of Jews marched out of the camp, braving zero-degree weather in thin pajamas and hole-ridden shoes. Shots rang out — at first just a few, and then a regular stream, as more and more prisoners failed to go on.
“After a while, the shots no longer bothered me,” Buergenthal said during a talk at Dartmouth College on Thursday. “I’d gotten used to it.”
Buergenthal, a legal scholar in America and worldwide advocate for human rights with bodies such as the International Criminal Court, visited the college to share his story, in an era in which memories of the Holocaust are fading and hatred is resurgent.
To overcome the temptation to sit down and end the ordeal by an SS officer’s bullet, Buergenthal chose to think of the march as a personal struggle with Adolf Hitler. “I decided that if I sat down he would win, and I wasn’t going to allow him to do that,” Buergenthal said.
Soviet soldiers liberated the survivors months later in Sachsenhausen, Germany, but it took more than a year for Buergenthal to reunite with his mother. He never saw his father again.
After the war, Buergenthal often asked himself, “Why did nobody speak up? Why did nobody say anything?”
His legal training provided an answer — there was no international framework to bring claims against a government on behalf of its own citizens. And his decades of work in human-rights law have helped to ensure that the international community can hold offenders accountable.
Speaking to a packed auditorium in Moore Hall, Buergenthal said that his life story has made him, perhaps counterintuitively, an optimist. He remains one now, even as nativism and racism sweep the Western world and human-rights abuses continue unabated in Syria and Myanmar.
“Somebody who has experienced what I have experienced cannot be cynical,” he said. “We have to fight.”
One of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, Buergenthal came to the United States after the war to study law. He taught at George Washington University’s law school, among others, eventually becoming a judge on the International Court of Justice.
Buergenthal received the 2008 Gruber Prize for Justice for his human-rights advocacy and jurisprudence, especially in Latin America, where he served on the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador in the early 1990s.
He reiterated his commitment to optimism in the face of brutality after his talk, during a discussion moderated by Daniel Benjamin, a former diplomat and the director of the Dickey Center for International Understanding.
“It seems like it’s a truly grim moment for human rights,” Benjamin said, citing atrocities across the world and what he called an absence of advocacy from the Trump administration. “How do we have confidence and optimism against that backdrop right now?”
“What else can we do?” Buergenthal asked. Rather than focus on current abuses, he pointed to the turnaround that took place in the very country that committed the atrocities.
“Germany proved that it is possible,” he said. “It just takes time, patience, and especially a commitment by the United States — which unfortunately is not what it used to be.”
A survey conducted by a Jewish advocacy organization in February and released earlier this month shows that Americans’ knowledge of the atrocity has waned.
Many of the 1,350 respondents thought the number of Jews killed was far fewer than the actual figure, about 6 million. About half thought Hitler came to power by force, rather than by democratic election. Two thirds of millennials and 40 percent of all Americans didn’t know what the Holocaust was.
The poll was conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, an international organization formed to pursue restitution for victims of Nazi persecution and their families.
“It’s frightening,” Buergenthal said of the survey during an interview after the talk. “It means we need to work much harder. If we forget the Holocaust, states will think that people will forget what they’re doing now.”
Meanwhile, the tides of racial, ethnic and religious animosity are rising, with the Anti-Defamation League reporting a 57 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017.
Vianey Rueda, a junior who studies government, asked Buergenthal what he thought of a new law in Poland that forbids mention of collaboration between the Polish government and the Nazis, given that “we’re struggling to protect such history and advances in human rights.”
The legal scholar called the legislation “a great disappointment,” but — drawn, as ever, to the bright side — he predicted that the European Union could fight revisionist attitudes in Poland with economic pressure.
One of the countries already putting the squeeze on Poland, he noted, is Germany.
“Today’s Germany gives me hope that nations can change for the better,” he said earlier that afternoon, “and that I have not wasted my time in this field.”
Buergenthal is scheduled to give another talk, on Saturday, at the Roth Center for Jewish Life at Dartmouth.
The public event is scheduled for 1 p.m., following a RSVP-only lunch.
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.