A LUCKY CHILD Thomas Buergenthal (Profile, £15)

This wonderful book tells the remarkable story of Thomas Buergenthal’s survival of the Holocaust. He was the only son of a German mother and Polish father, who owned and ran a hotel in Lubochna before the war.

They were hounded out by anti-Semitism, into the ghetto at Kielce in Poland, where they lived in appalling conditions for the first four years of the war, before then being transported to Auschwitz in early August 1944. By chance, he avoided selection for immediate liquidation on arrival there and managed to survive, despite the dreadful conditions and the brutality of the guards. Once, when collecting garbage from the back of the SS kitchen, he slipped through an open window to sip milk from a pan near the stove. I believe him when he says: “No milk has ever tasted so good.”

When the camp was evacuated in the depths of winter, Thomas and the remaining inmates had to walk for days on snow and ice on the aptly named Auschwitz Death March before being loaded onto open railway trucks for the journey to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, deep in Germany. As the train passed through parts of Czechoslovakia, people on bridges threw loaves of bread to the prisoners in the trucks. Thomas survived the march and the train journey, but lost two toes because of frostbite. He was admitted to the camp infirmary, expecting to be killed at any time.

However, he was liberated from the Sachsenhausen infirmary shortly afterwards by Soviet soldiers advancing into Germany.

The next part of the book tells of his adoption as a mascot by a unit of the Polish Army and a long spell in a Jewish orphanage, “waiting to be found”.

Eventually he was found by his mother, but he then learned that his father had not survived the Holocaust.

After a new beginning with his mother, Thomas eventually moved to America, where he furthered his education and then devoted his life to international and human rights law.

He is now the American judge at the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

Once, when he was young, Thomas’s mother had gone to a famous fortune-teller, who had told her that her son was ein Gluckskind (a lucky child). So he proved to be.