A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

immediately became my “uncles” and “aunts.” I
     played with their children, and they kept an eye on me when my parents had to be away on an errand. They usually gathered
     in some café or park. Here they played cards, read newspapers, whispered a lot about the war that was coming, and worried.
     Everybody was waiting for their “lucky day.” And every so often, there would be a celebration, much kissing, and many tears:
     somebody’s lucky day had arrived in the form of a long-awaited visa from the British consulate, allowing the recipient to travel
     to England. Soon those who had been granted visas would leave Katowice, usually in small groups or transports put together
     by the British consulate.
    Our lucky day was not to come for some time. In the meantime, I remember playing in a lovely park in Katowice and swimming
     in a nearby lake. The Jewish community in the city apparently provided some help for needy refugees, as did various individuals
     associated with it. I remember being taken shopping by a very nice man who had befriended my parents and returning home with
     toys and wearing a completely new outfit: new pants, shirt, and jacket. He had thought I looked too German in the clothes
     my mother liked me to wear. From time to time, we would also be invited to dinner in Jewish homes, although this did not happen
     all that often, and certainly not as often as I would have liked; I would have been happy to escape our ugly room and meager
     meals.
    One day my mother came home in a very excited state. She told my father that she and a girlfriend had gone to a famous fortune-teller.
     Before going in, Mutti had taken off her wedding ring, and, because she looked much younger than her age — she was twenty-seven
     years old at the time — she was very surprised when the fortune-teller, after studying her cards, proclaimed that my mother
     was married and had one child. In addition to knowing a great deal about our family background, the fortune-teller told my
     mother that her son was “
ein Glückskind
” — a lucky child — and that he would emerge unscathed from the future that awaited us.
    My father scolded my mother for believing this nonsense and for spending money on it when we had barely any left. But my mother
     claimed that her girlfriend had paid for the visit because she wanted someone to accompany her. “Besides, maybe the fortune-teller
     knows something we don’t know, for how else could she have known so much about me?” she retorted. “The only thing the fortune-teller
     knows that we don’t know is how to make money in these bad times,” barked my father. The argument between them continued for
     a while.
    None of us knew at the time, and I only found out much later, that the fortune-teller’s prediction about me would sustain
     my mother’s hopes in the years ahead, when we were separated. Even after the war, when friends tried to convince her to give
     up searching for me and not to continue torturing herself, for “Tommy could not possibly have survived,” she would reply that
     she knew I was alive. To me, she insisted years later that everything the fortune-teller had told her had come true. “Of course,
     I don’t believe in this hocus-pocus,” she would add in all earnestness, only to contradict herself immediately by asking,
     “but how do you explain that she was right about you and me?”
    Our lucky day came a few weeks after my mother’s visit to the fortune-teller. We received the prized visas for travel to England
     and were scheduled to leave Katowice on September 1, 1939. There was the usual excitement among our friends, with everybody
     wishing us well and expressing the hope that we would all soon be reunited in England. I was told that we would be in England
     in a few weeks and that once there we would no longer have to be afraid of the Nazis.
    But it was not to be. On our “lucky day,” Hitler decided to invade Poland. When we arrived at the Katowice