Born a refugee
Thomas Buergenthal was born on May 11, 1934, in Ľubochňa, a small resort town in the mountains of what was then Czechoslovakia and is now Slovakia. His parents, Mundek and Gerda, were German and Polish Jews who had left Germany in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. Mundek, who had worked for a Jewish bank in Berlin, ran a hotel in Ľubochňa that welcomed other refugees and exiles fleeing Nazi persecution. Gerda had grown up in Göttingen. The couple met on her holiday, became engaged within days, and their only child was born a little under a year later.
The safety did not last. In 1938 and 1939 Nazi Germany dismantled Czechoslovakia and created a satellite Slovak state, and the fascist Hlinka Guard confiscated the family hotel. The Buergenthals moved to Poland, hoping to reach Great Britain. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, before they could leave, and like thousands of other refugees they ended up in the city of Kielce, where the local Jewish community helped them get by.
The ghetto, Auschwitz and a death march
In 1941 the German authorities sealed the Jews of Kielce into a ghetto. Thomas, then seven, lived with his parents in a single room, short of food and afraid of raids and random shootings. In August 1942 the Germans liquidated the ghetto and sent about 20,000 of its Jews, among them Thomas's grandparents, to be murdered at Treblinka. His father, who supervised a ghetto workshop, marched his family and a few workers out with their work papers as if on official business, and they were kept in a small labor camp instead. In May 1943 the Germans rounded up the children still in the camp and took them to the cemetery to be shot. Thomas told the commandant in German that he could work, and he was let go. Nearly all the other children were killed.
In August 1944 the family was deported to Auschwitz. Children his age were normally sent straight to the gas chambers, but because the transport came from a labor camp there was no selection when it arrived. Separated from his mother, Thomas survived months in Birkenau by hiding during roll calls that turned into selections. Once he was picked for the gas chambers, and a Polish doctor working with the camp resistance sent him to another part of the camp. In January 1945, as the Soviet army approached, he was forced on the death march out of Auschwitz, carried west in open coal cars and marched again to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, where frostbitten toes had to be amputated. Soviet forces liberated the camp in April 1945. He was about to turn 11.
A lucky child
After liberation a Polish unit attached to the Red Army took the boy in, dressed him in a small uniform and treated him as its mascot. He later landed in a Jewish orphanage in Otwock, near Warsaw, where a Zionist youth group put his name on a list of orphans hoping to go to Palestine. His mother, who had been liberated near the Ravensbrück camp and had spent nearly two years searching for her husband and son, found Thomas's name on that list. They were reunited in Göttingen in December 1946. Soon after, they learned that his father had died in a camp shortly before the end of the war.
In December 1951, at 17, Thomas sailed to the United States to live with an uncle in Paterson, New Jersey. He finished high school, went to Bethany College in West Virginia on a full scholarship, and graduated in 1957. He then earned a law degree at New York University in 1960 as a Root-Tilden Scholar, followed by a master's and a doctorate in international law at Harvard Law School. Decades later he told the story of his childhood in A Lucky Child, a memoir first published in Germany in 2007, where it became a bestseller, and later in more than a dozen languages, with a foreword by Elie Wiesel. The title came from a fortune teller who once told his mother that her son was a Glückskind, a lucky child.
Building the law of human rights
Buergenthal made the protection of human rights his life's work at a time when the field barely existed as a branch of law. He taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the University of Texas, and in 1973 he and Louis Sohn published International Protection of Human Rights, an early multivolume casebook that helped establish the subject as a legal discipline. Over his career he wrote more than a dozen books, among them International Human Rights in a Nutshell, a compact guide still used by law students in its later editions, and Protecting Human Rights in the Americas.
From 1980 to 1985 he was dean of the Washington College of Law at American University. He then held an endowed chair at Emory University, where from 1986 to 1989 he directed the human rights program of the Carter Center, the organization founded by former President Jimmy Carter. He then joined the George Washington University Law School, where he became the Lobingier Professor of Comparative Law and Jurisprudence and taught generations of students who went on to work in governments, courts and human rights groups around the world. A scholarship in his name at GW Law supports students from Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics.
A founding judge for the Americas
In 1979 Buergenthal was elected to the new Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San José, Costa Rica, created to enforce the American Convention on Human Rights. He served on it until 1991 and was its president from 1985 to 1987. These were the years when military governments and civil wars across Latin America were making thousands of people vanish, and the young court had to show that a treaty could protect real people against their own states.
He sat on the bench in Velásquez Rodríguez v. Honduras, decided in 1988, the court's landmark ruling on enforced disappearances. The court held Honduras responsible for the disappearance of a student activist seized by armed men in 1981, because the state had failed to prevent the crime, investigate it or punish those responsible, and it ordered compensation for his family. The principle that governments must investigate and remedy grave abuses, not merely refrain from committing them, became a cornerstone of human rights law and has influenced the European Court of Human Rights and African human rights bodies. Today families of the disappeared across the Americas still rely on it.
Truth for El Salvador and a seat on the UN committee
In 1992 the United Nations asked Buergenthal to serve on the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador with Belisario Betancur, the former president of Colombia, and Reinaldo Figueredo Planchart, a former foreign minister of Venezuela. Created under the peace accords that ended a twelve-year civil war in which about 75,000 people were killed, the commission gathered some 22,000 testimonies, brought in forensic experts to exhume the victims of the El Mozote massacre, and investigated crimes such as the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests. Its report, From Madness to Hope, published in March 1993, found that most of the abuses had been committed by government forces and named those it held responsible.
From 1995 to 1999 he was a member of the UN Human Rights Committee, the body of independent experts that monitors how states keep the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; he was the first American elected to it. He also served as a judge of the Administrative Tribunal of the Inter-American Development Bank, and as vice chairman of the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland, which decided claims by Holocaust victims and their heirs to Swiss bank accounts left untouched since the war.
Judge at the World Court
In 2000 Buergenthal was elected to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the principal court of the United Nations, which settles legal disputes between countries. He served from March 2000 until he stepped down in September 2010 and returned to teaching at George Washington University. He was the court's American judge for a decade, taking part in disputes between states and in advisory opinions requested by UN bodies.
His best-known individual vote was in the court's 2004 advisory opinion on the barrier Israel was building in the West Bank, where he was the only one of 15 judges to dissent. In his declaration he agreed that Israeli settlements breach the Fourth Geneva Convention and that Palestinians have a right of self-determination, but argued that the court had not examined the facts, including Israel's security claims, closely enough to reach its conclusions.
A Jewish survivor's mission
Buergenthal was born to Jewish parents and was persecuted, imprisoned and nearly murdered because he was Jewish. He said often that his human rights work grew out of that childhood, and out of the belief that law could have been used to stop what happened to his family in the 1930s. In testimony he recorded for the USC Shoah Foundation in 1997 he spoke about how the world had let genocides happen again in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, and said he believed in keeping the past alive only if it served to prevent future suffering.
He chaired the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and helped establish its genocide prevention program, and in 2015 the museum gave him its highest honor, the Elie Wiesel Award. He also kept close ties with Germany: he became the first president of the advisory council of the International Nuremberg Principles Academy, founded in the city where Nazi leaders were tried, and in 2016 he received the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Legacy
Thomas Buergenthal died at his home in Miami, Florida, on May 29, 2023, at the age of 89. He was survived by his wife, Marjorie, three sons, two stepchildren and their families. Among his honors were the 2008 Gruber Prize for Justice, awarded for his work protecting human rights, especially in Latin America, the Manley O. Hudson Medal of the American Society of International Law, and the Olympic Order for his service on the International Olympic Committee's Ethics Commission.
His legacy is measured in institutions and principles that still protect people. The Inter-American Court he helped launch now hears cases from across Latin America; the duty to investigate disappearances that it set out under his watch is applied in courts on several continents; the El Salvador commission's report remains the official record of that country's war; and thousands of lawyers learned human rights law from his books and classes. The boy who survived Auschwitz by chance spent his life building rules so that fewer people would have to depend on luck.
Sources & further reading
Thomas Buergenthal, Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum · Judge Thomas Buergenthal, 89, Pioneer of International Human Rights and One of Auschwitz's Youngest Survivors, USC Shoah Foundation · Former law professor, International Court of Justice judge, Holocaust survivor dies at 89, The GW Hatchet · Thomas Buergenthal: Oral History Excerpts, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum · Thomas Buergenthal, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.