Whenever I think of Auschwitz—or Birkenau or Mauthausen or Theresienstadt, the names that in this season of Holocaust remembrance are coming back to haunt us from sixty years ago—I think of a retired Australian United Nations official called Tom Luke.
Tom wasn’t born Australian, and he wasn’t born Tom Luke. He was born Tomas Lowenbach in 1926 into a bourgeois Jewish family in Hronov, in what was then Czechoslovakia. When the Nazis occupied his country and annexed it to the Third Reich, Tom was expelled from school and put to work as a construction labourer. His family’s property—a factory, a comfortable home—were expropriated. In 1942, with his parents and little sister, Tom was sent to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt. Birkenau followed; then Auschwitz, where his mother and sister were murdered; and finally, in January 1945, the death march to Mauthausen, when Auschwitz was evacuated by the retreating German Army. Exhausted, sick, several times close to death and with the toes of both feet lost to frostbite, Tom survived, but barely. When American soldiers liberated him, Tom began a two-year stint in various hospitals, battling for his life. He won, but normal life would not last long; in 1948, the Communists seized power and within weeks tossed the outspoken young idealist in jail. This time he had no plans to remain behind bars. With his father—his sole surviving relative from an extended clan of over sixty who had met their end in the camps—Tom escaped from Czechoslovakia. In 1949, the pair migrated to Australia.
Tom’s next decade was spent surmounting his past: supporting himself through manual labour, acquiring an education (including scholarships to Geneva and Yale), discovering the joys of love, and acquiring a new identity, as an Australian called Tom Luke. And when the time came to decide what he would do in the world, what profession he would devote his learning to, there was only one choice Tom wanted to make: he joined the Organization that had emerged, like himself, from the ashes of war and holocaust—the United Nations.
When I first met Tom, he was already more than halfway through a 28-year career with the UN, working for developing countries and then for refugees. Slight of build, good-looking, with a quirky sense of humour and a perpetual twinkle in his eye, meticulous about his work and obsessive about little matters of detail, he did not strike me as someone who had endured unimaginable horrors in his youth. But one day in summer I saw him in his shirtsleeves, the indelible blackish-green numbers of the concentration camp inmates tattooed into his arm. Gradually—for Tom is a reticent man—I pieced together his story.
He did not like to tell it. For him the past was only relevant as a guide to the future, as instruction and warning. The values and principles of the United Nations were his own; they had been forged in the same crucible. The work he was doing for the UN was to ensure that what happened to millions like him could not happen again. He toiled for refugees because he had been one himself, but the lessons of his life went beyond that. He could not abide racism of any sort. “When the Americans liberated Mauthausen, the first face I saw at the window was the face of a black GI”, he told me. “For me, that black face was the face of freedom.”
Nor could he abide tyranny or the abridgement of the democratic freedoms he had had to flee his country to enjoy. While in Mauthausen, he had repeatedly been saved from certain death not by a fellow Jew but by a Czech political prisoner, a former primary school teacher. That basic human decency was a powerful example in itself, but it also confirmed his admiration for political dissidents anywhere. He made contributions to Solidarity in Poland, travelling there privately in the early 1980s to see how he could help. When Vaclav Havel began his velvet revolution in Prague, Tom, at great personal and professional risk, smuggled printing and publishing equipment into Czechoslovakia to aid the underground press there. He saw no contradiction with his role as a United Nations official, sworn to uphold the rights of its Member States. The ideals he was defending were those of the United Nations Charter, drawn up by men and women for whom “never again” was more than a slogan.
Tom now lives in retirement in Geneva with his child-psychologist wife, not far from the two adult children on whom he dotes. He says he is mildly disillusioned with humanity and so pleasantly surprised by the acts of courage and decency of which human beings sometimes prove capable. His biggest challenge, he adds with a smile, is learning to live with a deteriorating body. He never mentions the years when his challenge was learning to live at all.
When the United Nations commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Tom’s health would not permit him to travel to New York for the ceremony. But, in fact, he did not need to come. He could not have stood at the event, but what he stood for is embedded in the foundations of the UN. Beyond those foundations, there is much about the UN that is in need of renovation. But in the Organization’s sixtieth year, there are few better advertisements for the animating spirit of the United Nations than that it embodies the ideals to which a man like Tom Luke has devoted his life. |
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