Meanwhile.

• Author: Tharoor, Shashi
• Position: Appreciation

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...