A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Thomas Buergenthal

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You may have heard of the Auschwitz Concentration Camps, where German Nazis performed unspeakable acts of ethnic cleansing against the Jews during the Second World War. Over the course of this calamity, about six million Jews lost their lives to the scourge of Nazism. Six million is a figure that we as bystanders are used to applying in a generalized sense to this profound tragedy, unintentionally turning the victims into a faceless, soulless and replaceable mass. Yet in reality, for those who personally lived through this experience, every person who perished was once an individual soul, and each had precious stories worth telling.

The author Thomas Buergenthal is one such survivor. At the Auschwitz concentration camp, he was robbed of his name and labeled B-2930. Thereafter, this serial number remained branded on his left arm, a permanent scar like all that he had experienced in his childhood. In this book, he recounts to us in vivid and honest detail every moment spent at the concentration camps and every face that he encountered. He does all this from the perspective of a child who was lucky enough to have survived the Holocaust.