A LUCKY CHILD

A colleague from a former lifetime expressed his relief that the United States no longer acted as the terrorists they were fighting. Judge Thomas Buergenthal, who now sits at the International Court of Justice in The Hague,claims the U.S. made the mistake of "assuming the only way to fight terrorism is to throw your values out the window. If we stuck to our values and own procedures, we could have achieved more without facing any of the problems we face now."

Judge Buergenthal enjoyed a distinguished academic career before he became the first U.S. judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, where he served as its President from 1989 to 1994. He later served on the UN Truth Commission for El Salvador from 1995 to 1999, where he investigated the history of human rights violations during that country's long civil war. In 2000 he joined the ICJ.

Now 75-years old, Judge Buergenthal recently published a memoir of his childhood spent in the Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz. He attributed his survival to luck, citing times when he slept with inmates who had diptheria but he never contracted it and other such moments which could have led to certain death. In his memoir,"A Lucky Child," he says he never faced survivor syndrome that has plagued many Holocaust survivors and that it was relatively easy writing the book after all these years. He did recall that his mother when asked to set down her recollections often broke down and wept at the memory of those horrible times. The book has an introduction written by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel.

Judge Buergenthal made his remarks about the war on terror while in Australia where he shared a podium with Vicenzo Cerami, who wrote Life is Beautiful, the Oscar-winning film about an Italian boy who survives the Nazi death camps through the ingenuity and love of his father.