Thomas Buergenthal is Professor of Law at the George Washington University National Law Center in the U.S.A., where he is an international human rights scholar. As a young boy he lived through the Auschwitz Death March. He recounts how in January 1945, as a boy who had already survived the Polish Ghetto of Kielce and the Auschwitz concentration camp, he was marched in frigid weather to a train bound for another concentration camp in Sachsenhausen, Germany. The march left him with frostbite. He witnessed beatings and shootings, ate snow and grasped for scraps of bread to survive. His toes were later amputated. Having suffered through these experiences, and then having gone on to become one of the world’s leading international law scholars, Buergenthal is able to provide us with an invaluable perspective on the meaning and significance of human rights and the consequences of their violation. On the occasion of a U.S. Holocaust Museum commemoration in 1995, he reflected that while some small relief had come to him over the years through the fading of his childhood memories, they were regularly restored by television images of various atrocities toward the end of the last century: the hollow faces of children starving in Africa, the tormented ones of Bosnian children. He implores us to embrace a universalistic and empathetic commitment to human rights.

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