285 pages April 4,2023 publication date Publisher Thread
About The Book
“I found myself in the Auschwitz stables, and I felt an ember of hope. If I could make myself useful, helping these horses, maybe I could stay alive.”
In the darkest moment of history, one child found the courage and strength to survive the unimaginable. This is Henry’s true story.
One hot, humid day in July, 1943, the Gestapo abducted fifteen-year-old Henry and his mother, forcing them onto cramped cattle cars in the Łódź Polish Ghetto. Like so many Jews before them, they had been selected to disappear – they were being sent to Auschwitz.
Exhausted after hours of traveling, they finally emerged from the stifling, filth-ridden cattle car. Already devastated at having lost his father to starvation, Henry clutched his mother’s frail hand, knowing she was all he had left in the world, and that he was the only one left to protect her. In a flash, he felt them being brutally torn apart.
Crying out for her, his heart shuddered as he watched her disappear into a sea of other women. Henry knew that was the last time he would ever see her, and he felt like he had failed her. He was now completely alone in the world.
Starving, and close to giving up all hope, Henry volunteered to work in the stables, responsible for breeding horses for the war effort. As he watched other prisoners leave and never return, Henry quickly realised these horses were his only lifeline – because every morning he was sent to the stables, was one more morning he escaped the gas chambers.
Before long, caring for the horses became a passion, and their comfort and strength gave Henry a glimmer of life and hope in an ocean of death. Although with every second that passed, Henry knew if he became too weak or made one mistake, he would be mercilessly replaced…
This is the heart-wrenching and inspirational true account of a courageous little German boy who, against all odds, after losing almost everything a human being can lose, survived to tell his story.
This book was originally published as The Kindness of the Hangman.
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My Thoughts
There are accounts of people who have survived the abuse of the power of the Nazi’s but not many stories of surviving children. This is one of those stories.
Just six years old when he starts school in Cognac, Germany Jewish child Henry Oster enters school on the first day excited. Living as an only child of well to do parents he doesn’t know he’s different or Jewish until after school when the non-Jewish children attack with more than words the Jewish children. The jews have all their rights stripped away, not allowed to own businesses or homes they feel powerless, useless. Against their will they are rounded up like cattle and sent to a repurposed ghetto with broken windows a lack of food and severe overcrowding. Eventually they are sent to a concentration camp. You feel a deep empathy for these characters as their horrific conditions and treatment is revealed.
At a camp Henry is in charge of the horses because of his native German language which the horses are used to getting commands in.
I have read many historical accounts of Auschwitz and its prisoners, but this account is unlike any I’ve read before. In the face of incredible horror and danger to not only survive but to have his story told. He was a very brave person and his life, and the life of the others counted.
Such a time in history we must never forget.
Pub Date: 04 Apr 2023
I was given a complimentary copy of this book.
All opinions expressed are my own.
The Author
n 1933 Henry Oster was just 5 years old, a carefree kindergartner in Cologne, Germany, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seized power. For the next 12 years Henry struggled to keep on breathing while his family, his friends and the Jews of Europe were overwhelmed by the Holocaust. Henry hid his mother from the SS in an attic in the Lodz, Poland Ghetto. He escaped a firing squad in Auschwitz. Endured a death march through the Polish winter. Formed a life-long friendship in the nightmare barracks of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Saw his friends killed by a British fighter-bomber. And came within hours of starving to death before his liberation by General Patton’s 3rd Army. Henry rebuilt his life from nothing, coming of age as a free young man in Paris. He arrived in the U.S. with no English, no money and no education. And from the ashes of a ruined past built a life full of love, joy and compassion. Now, complete with chilling documents liberated from the Nazi concentration camps themselves, his heartbreaking, triumphant story can finally be told.
Dexter Ford is a Contributing Writer to The New York Times and other major publications on history, politics, the Holocaust, World War ll, architecture, transportation technology and the auto, aviation, motorcycle industries. He also writes extensively on adventure travel: he has flown upside-down with the Blue Angels, ridden a motorcycle through China, Russia, and the Andes, and swum alone, at night, with airplane-sized Manta Rays. Mr. Ford lives in Manhattan Beach, California and Higgins Bay, New York. –This text refers to the hardcover edition.
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