From ‘Lucky Child’ to ‘Day by Day’
Lawyer rediscovers a best-selling Holocaust diary and republishes it
This is a story all about connections — literary, emotional, familial, historical — but it started in the most disconnected way possible.
It began with the diary of Odd Nansen, a Norwegian whom the Nazis arrested and stored in a series of concentration camps from 1942 to the war’s end in 1945. Nansen, whose writings and line drawings chronicled the harshness, brutality, and random terror of life in a concentration camp from his ever-so-slightly elevated position as a Scandinavian, worked on tissue-thin paper and was able to save some pages and have them smuggled out of camp inside wooden panels the prisoners used as breadboards. He had a friend who was in the camp’s woodworking shop hollow out some panels for him.
The pages were disconnected from each other, from their author, and from the world for years. Eventually Mr. Nansen gathered them, reconnected them, and published them as “From Day to Day: One Man’s Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps.” The book was a best-seller until it vanished from public awareness just a few years later.
In 2010, Timothy Boyce, a lawyer who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and was the managing partner of the international law firm Dechert LLP’s Charlotte office, was browsing in a bookstore, looking for something new to read.
It’s something he does often.
“Even though I enjoyed being a lawyer, and I was fairly successful at it, I always had a nagging sense that I should have been a history teacher,” he said. “I majored in economics, but if I could go back and do it again, I’d major in history.”
So when he was in the bookstore, he gravitated, as he generally did, to the history and memoir sections. “I saw a Holocaust memoir, in the rack, facing out,” Mr. Boyce said. “It was called ‘A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy,’ by a gentleman named Thomas Buergenthal.
“I knew nothing about it, but I acted on impulse and I bought it, and I started to read.
“The story is about how Thomas survived Auschwitz,” Mr. Boyce said. “He was one of the youngest survivors. He wrote that he was there until late January of 1945, when he was sent on a death trip. His destination then was Sackhausen.”
As he learned from “Lucky Child,” Mr. Buergenthal first entered a work camp in 1939, when he was 5 years old. He’d been with both his parents until they got to Auschwitz in August of 1944, when his mother was sent to the women’s camp. That November, she was shipped to Ravensbruk; he was able to see her once, through barbed wire. He was with his father until later that month, when they were separated. So Thomas, at 10, was on his own in the cattle car, for 10 days.
“When he got to Sackhausen, his feet were badly frostbitten and he went to the infirmary there. The doctor, a fellow prisoner, decided that he had to amputate some toes.” He did, and Thomas was allowed to rest in a bed there.
“And then a Norwegian prisoner comes in. It’s Odd Nansen.
“Nansen came from an incredible pedigree of humanitarians,” Mr. Boyce said.
He was an architect, sketch artist, and humanitarian who worked early in the war to help Jewish refugees; his father, Fridtjof Nansen, was an Arctic explorer, oceanographer, and humanitarian who skied across Greenland and later won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work with refugees.
The Nazis threw Odd Nansen into Sackhausen as a political prisoner — “a hostage,” Mr. Boyce said; because he was Norwegian, he was treated better than the Jews. “He was allowed to receive food parcels — only Norwegians and Danes were allowed that, because they were Teutonic.”
When Mr. Nansen saw the by-then-11-year-old Thomas in bed, “my heart just went out to him,” Mr. Boyce said that Mr. Nansen wrote. “‘There was something about him. He looked like an angel.’
“So from then on, Nansen used the food he got to bribe the orderly to protect Thomas.
“Thomas wrote that this Norwegian saved his life and wrote about him in his memoir.” In a footnote on page 176, Mr. Buergenthal included the title of Mr. Nansen’s memoir.
Mr. Buergenthal went on to have an extraordinary life. His father died of pneumonia just weeks before the war ended, but his mother survived, and she searched for her son. “Her friends said, ‘Gerda, you have to let go. There is no way that he can have survived Auschwitz.’ But she said, ‘Oh, no. I know that my son is alive somewhere. He is a lucky child.’
“She searched high and low for him.”
Meanwhile, “Thomas had been liberated by Polish and Russian soldiers just before the war ended. He didn’t know where to go, so the Polish soldiers adopted him as their mascot.
“But then, at one point, after they went back to Poland, one of the soldiers said to him, ‘You’re Jewish, aren’t you?’ But he wrote, ‘I had long since learned not to say anything, and so I didn’t. Then the soldier said, “I know that you are Jewish. And I know that you can’t live your whole life as our mascot.
“‘There is a Jewish orphanage just outside Warsaw. You can live there with other kids.’”
Remember, Thomas was 11 then.
“So Tom agreed,” Mr. Boyce said. “Tom wrote, ‘I figured that if I survived, then certainly so did my parents, who are much smarter than I am. It’s just a matter of time before they find me.’
“So weeks go by, months go by, and it begins to dawn on him that no, maybe his parents did not survive.
“And then, somebody working at the orphanage convinced some of them to emigrate to Palestine, telling them, ‘You have no future here. And do you really want to grow up in Poland?’ So Tom finally agreed to emigrate, and his name ended up on a list of an organization that was smuggling kids to Palestine.
“There was a Jewish agency in Palestine that had a list of immigrants, and of missing persons. And someone in that agency — and remember, this was way before computers and databases — looked at the list and said, ‘Wait a minute. There’s a Tom Buergenthal who’s missing, and his mother is looking for him.’
“And that’s how Tom ended up reunited with his mother.”
The mother and son went back to Germany, and Tom’s mother found a tutor. She told the tutor that he had a year to teach her son everything he’d need to get into eighth grade, where he belonged chronologically. Tom had never been to school — he was functionally illiterate, although Mr. Boyce thinks it might be possible that he learned his letters at the orphanage.
It works. He goes to school. “But by the time he’s in 11th grade, he has concluded that he cannot live in Germany,” Mr. Boyce said. “His mother remarried a man who wanted to take her to Italy, so he no longer felt responsible for her.
“And he had an aunt and uncle who lived in Paterson. He arrived in Paterson in 1951. He was living with an aunt and uncle he’d never met before; he was thrown into high school — Paterson Eastside High School — although he knew very little English. And although he had amputated toes, he made the track team.”
His path from there was ever upward.
“He got a scholarship to Bethany College, a small liberal arts school, and he graduated as valedictorian,” Mr. Boyce said. “He went to NYU law school, and then to Harvard law school to get a master’s degree in human rights and international law. He said that he was studying that because of Odd Nansen.
“In 2000 he was appointed a judge on the International Court of Justice in the Hague.”
He died in Florida in 2023, at 89.
Meanwhile, “Odd Nansen’s book came out in 1947,” Mr. Boyce said. “It was a number one best-seller in Norway in 1947.” It had been written in Norwegian; but in 1949 a British woman, Katherine John, translated it into English, G.P. Putnam published it in 1947, and “it got fantastic reviews,” Mr. Boyce said.
One of those rave reviewers was William L. Shirer, the journalist who wrote the magisterial “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” Others joining the chorus included Time magazine, then an influential publication, and the New Yorker.
And then it vanished. It went out of print almost immediately.
Why? “I’m not sure, but my theory is that people were tired of the war. By then, Germany was our ally in the Cold War, so reading about the nasty things they’d done wasn’t very comfortable.”
When Mr. Boyce read “Lucky Boy,” he developed an immense curiosity about Mr. Nansen. “Being the history lover that I am,” he said, he tried to find “From Day to Day” and learned from his Google searches that there was one copy of the book on sale in the United States, two in Great Britain, and one in Australia.
“I ordered one of them,” he said. “And this big tome, over 500 pages, hard cover, shows up, and I start reading it,” he said. “I was almost a blank slate. I didn’t know if it would be interesting or not. But then I just got absolutely hooked by it.
“It is so eloquent, so insightful, so moving, so inspiring that even before I finished it, I told my wife that I couldn’t believe that I’d found one of the world’s forgotten masterpieces. But if I’d told six of my friends to buy it, we’d have cornered the world’s market.
“So I said that I would get it back into print.” And he did.
Mr. Boyce read “Lucky Boy,” and through that he developed a connection not only to that book, and through it to “From Day to Day,” but he also connected with Mr. Buergenthal. “He had three sons, and I’ve meet all of them. I’ve also met his widow, Peggy, who is a delightful person.”
His passionate, possibly obsessive interest in “From Day to Day” and Odd Nansen led to major changes in Mr. Boyce’s life. He retired from his law practice in 2014; he’d turned 60, and “I was trying to get the book back into print, and I realized that working on it at night and on the weekends wasn’t cutting it. I had to do it full time.”
Vanderbilt University Press published the book in 2016. Since then, Mr. Boyce has devoted himself to talking about it; his audiences have grown by word of mouth, and by now he’s developed a following and a reputation.
Mr. Boyce calls himself the book’s editor, but that’s not really accurate. He changed nothing that Mr. Nansen had written. Instead, he added context; he did a great deal of research to explain and detail Mr. Nansen’s text. “I wrote footnotes, and I have a fairly long introduction, where I laid out who the characters were and what happened to them after the war,” he said. “It’s a kind of annotation”; in a way, Mr. Boyce — who is Roman Catholic — produced a gemara to explicate Mr. Nansen’s mishna, combining them for a sort of mid-20th-century Talmud.
“In the course of this work, I became close not only with Tom and his family, but also with Odd Nansen’s family. His elderly daughter, Marit Nansen Greve, who died only about three years ago, remembered everything about his life, and we became such close friends that she visited me twice in America.
“I love going to Norway. I’d never been there before, and now I’ve been there multiple times. It’s a beautiful place.”
By now, Mr. Boyce has fulfilled his early goal for himself. He’s a teacher. Not a conventional one, bound to a specific classroom and one set of students, but a traveling instructor, teaching the subjects that interest him the most.
“My entire goal is to get people to read this diary,” he said. “I do not think that anyone can not be affected by this man’s eloquence, by his example of what a human should be.
“I learned that when Nansen’s diary was translated into English, it also was translated into German, and he gave away all the rights to German refugees after the war. I decided that if I could ever get this book published, I would donate my speaking fees and royalties. So Marit and I decided together that 50 percent of it would go to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in D.C., and the other half would go to the Center for the Study of the Holocaust in Oslo.
“At this point, my donations have been around $30,000. That’s a not-insignificant amount of money. Luckily, I had a good career. I don’t want anybody to think that I was doing this to make a buck. That is not at all my motive.
“I want people to be inspired by the most amazing book they are likely ever to read in their lifetime.”
Who: Timothy Boyce
What: Talks about Odd Nansen’s memoir, which he annotated and had republished
Where: at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly
When: On Sunday, November 10, at 3 p.m.
How much: $8 for JCC members, $10 for everyone else
For more information and to register: Go to jccotp.org, click on Adults, then Lectures and Learning.
ALSO
Who: Timothy Boyce
What: Talks about the memoir
Where: Online, for the Adult School in Morristown
When: On Tuesday, December 3, from 7 to 8:30 p.m.
For more information and to register: go to www.theadultschool.org, then Explore our Course, then to Lectures and Discussions, and then history.
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