A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy. It's unimaginable that I would find a book with such a subtitle entertaining. Gripping, suspenseful, heartbreaking... yes. But, entertaining? Surprisingly... yes, that too!
I don't know if I've ever heard a Holocaust survival story told from quite this perspective before. From early childhood affluence, to captivity, to surviving, to thriving! And, oh my goodness! What an amazing account!
I'm trying to figure out how to review this book without giving too much away. I don't want to rob the author of any story that he has already told much better than I could. Let's just say, A Lucky Child will give you a unique peek into a story of survival that exemplifies survival to the nth degree. His survival, part instinct, part happenstance, part genetics, part outside help, and major parts luck. Well, what the author as a decided unbeliever calls "luck", but I would call divine intervention.
As a child he survived several work camps, selections, and even a death march. This is a man who, according to the rules of the Holocaust, should never have become a man. He escaped the gas chambers and the firing squads so many times in his young life that you run out of fingers trying to keep count. Each time, in such an unexpected way that I found myself "whoot"ing (which is the noise that accompanies fist-pumping) out loud with every escape. (I do recall actually throwing a fist in a celebratory pump after one particularly successful chapter.)
The horrors he witnesses are given no more time or detail than required. More interesting are the stories of his day-to-day life, because these memories were burned with his childhood perspective. He recalls secretly learning how to ride a bike at a labor camp. How it feels to make friends under such circumstances. How to find a job that would grant you a bite more food a day. Where to stand to survive a daily count. How much time is the right amount of time to spend in the infirmary. What it's like to be separated from your parents, but how not dwell too much on the question of whether or not you still have parents.
Just as fascinating as his survival throughout the unsurvivable, is the story of his life after liberation. You don't often hear what became of the survivors immediately after freedom is granted. You walk out of the camp and where do you go? You're eleven years old and have been separated from your family. Do you still have a family? If so, what country are they in? You have no citizenship. How do you get there? There is still war. You are still hungry. How do you continue to survive?
He doesn't know how! He tells you what happened to him. Which was such a unusual chain of events that it's hard to believe he met them by just ambling on one day at a time. Ending up wherever life took him. (Which even leads him, at one point, to be informally "adopted" by the Polish army for a stint. With a pet circus pony, by the way.)
By the end, you'll see the unique education he was eventually granted. The special reunions he gets to have enjoyed. The roles and jobs he takes on as an adult. And, you'll just want to meet him one day to prove to yourself that he really is still here. As luck (or God) would have it!
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