A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Elie Wiesel, Thomas Buergenthal Read Free Book Online Page A

whatever tasks they were ordered to do. For the most part, they made clothes and shoes for the officers and their
     wives. The
Werkstatt
was just outside the ghetto walls, which meant that my father and all those who labored there had permits to leave the ghetto
     to go to work.
    Not long after my father became the head of the
Werkstatt,
my parents found out that my maternal grandparents had been deported from their home in Göttingen, Germany, to the Ghetto
     of Warsaw. How they got that news I do not know, but I remember my parents talking day and night about my grandparents and
     what could be done to bring them from Warsaw to Kielce. At some point I heard my father say, “I’ll talk to one of the officers
     of the
Schutzpolizei
. His wife has a big appetite for the fur coats we have been making for her; he also seems to be more human than the others.”
     Not long after, my grandparents arrived in our ghetto. To me it was a miracle, the nicest thing that had happened to us in
     years. My mother was very, very happy, and I finally had grandparents like some of my friends.

    Thomas’s grandmother, Rosa Blum-Silbergleit
    My grandparents were provided with a room in a house not far from where we lived. I would visit them daily and hear wonderful
     stories about my mother when she was a young girl, about her brother, Eric, who lived in America, and about their life in
     Göttingen before the Nazis came. They had seen me a few times when I was just a baby, but as far as I was concerned, this
     was my first meeting with them. Visiting them was to enter another world, a world far removed from the ghetto, one full of
     love and tranquility. Here, I felt safe and protected. The stories they told me about the past and the future transported
     me into a world in which all people lived in peace and where being a Jew was not a crime.
    The two families we were closest to in our apartment house were the Friedmanns and the Lachses. They were related to each
     other and still lived in their prewar apartments, one floor below us. My father and mother would often be guests in their
     homes, and I would play there with their children, Ucek and Zarenka, who were cousins. Zarenka was about four years old; Ucek
     must have been a year or so older. When I asked why the Friedmanns and the Lachses always had good food, I was told that they
     were rich and that when the war was over, we too would be rich again and have all the food we could eat. It was not easy for
     me to understand why we had to wait for the end of the war to be rich, but I kept these thoughts to myself.
    One morning in August 1942, while it was still very dark, we were awakened by loud honking, repeated bursts of gunfire, and
     announcements over loudspeakers: “
Alle raus, alle raus! Wer nicht raus kommt wird erschossen!
” (“All out, all out! Whoever does not come out will be shot!”) The ghetto was being liquidated or, in the words bellowing
     out of the loudspeakers, “
Aussiedlung! Aussiedlung!
” (“Evacuation! Evacuation!”) People were screaming and crying all around us. My mother immediately began to pack some of
     our belongings, while pleading with my father to hurry up. He was standing over our kitchen sink, shaving very deliberately
     and telling my mother to be quiet. “Let me think!” I heard him repeat over and over again. It was all very eerie, and the
     noise outside was getting louder and louder. When my father finished shaving, he put away his straight razor, helped my mother
     pack a few more things, and told us to follow him. There was shooting all around us, with one or two gunshots at a time coming
     from some of the houses the Germans had begun to search. When they encountered sick or old people who could not leave, they
     would simply shoot them on the spot and move on. We were the last family to come out of our building, just ahead of the marauding
     German death squads.

    Thomas’s grandfather, Paul Silbergleit
    Our courtyard was crowded