A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy (2007) is a memoir written by Thomas Buergenthal, in the vein of Night by Elie Wiesel or My Brother's Voice (2003) by Stephen Nasser, in which he recounts the astounding story of his surviving the Holocaust as a ten-year-old child owing to his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck.

Author Buergenthal's father, in response to the prophecy commented that "The only thing that fortune-teller knows that we don't know is how to make money in these bad times.

Thomas' father Mundek was born in Galicia (Eastern Europe), a region of Poland that belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War and received his education in German and Polish.

However, the rise of Hitler and growing violence against Jews caused Buergenthal senior to leave Germany for Ľubochňa in Czechoslovakia where he owned and managed a resort hotel.

There he met Gerda Silbergleit, Thomas' future mother, a 20-year-old German Jewish young woman on vacation from Göttingen.

In 1938 or early 1939, the Buergenthal's hotel was confiscated by the Hlinka Guard, a Slovak fascist party, and the family eventually moved to Katowice, Poland.

During the ultimate liquidation of the Arbeitslager, children were torn from their mothers and murdered in gruesome fashion in the Jewish cemetery of Kielce.

The marchers were now loaded into open freight cars and after more than ten days reached Germany, where Tommy eventually wound up with frozen feet in the infirmary at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where two of his toes were amputated.

Eleven-year-old Tommy saw the fall of Berlin dressed in a custom made uniform as the unofficial ward of a Company of the Polish Army.

Thomas Buergenthal dedicated himself to international law, concluding that he had a moral obligation to devote his professional life to the protection of human rights.

Tommy derived strength from such gallant and selfless acts in the face of adversity and these experiences were, in fact, the genesis of his lifelong commitment to human rights.

Due to the five decades that elapsed between the incidents detailed and the writing of the book, the author describes the most wrenching scenes with a detachment that makes the account less traumatic for the reader.

Elizabeth McCracken, author of "An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination" referred to A Lucky Child as "an extraordinary story... Heartbreaking and thrilling, it examines what it means to be human, in every good and awful sense."

"...why, in the midst of all these terrible events, some people find the strength and moral courage to oppose, or at the very least, not commit these monstrous crimes that others perpetrate with ease."

"What is in the human character that gives some individuals moral strength not to sacrifice their decency and dignity, regardless of the costs to themselves, whereas others become murderously ruthless in the hope of ensuring their own survival?"