The SS officers pushed us, yelling and hitting the shuffling river of children, women and men. "Men to the right,' they yelled. "Women to the left!' They were pulling my mother and me apart. We were caught in a tornado and pulled into the sky and then she was gone. Henry Oster was just five years old, a wide-eyed boy from the beautiful ancient city of Cologne, Germany, when Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. Torn from their home and deported to the infamous Lodz, Poland Ghetto, Henry and his family were imprisoned on their way to the Nazi death camps. Henry struggled to keep himself and his family alive and together in a world where the slightest misstep would mean they faced the Ghetto hangman. He worked crippling hours, scrounged and stole food, and hid his mother in a secret attic to avoid being captured in Nazi raids and shipped off to the killing camps in the Polish countryside. A Gestapo deception finally pushed them onto a stifling, filth-ridden cattle car, on a ride to a place whose name has come to symbolize the worst of humanity: Auschwitz. As others around him succumbed to the gas chambers, beatings, starvation and disease, Henry somehow found the strength to stay alive. He was assigned to work in the Auschwitz stables, breeding horses for the Russian invasion of the German war effort. He was put in charge of Barbarossa, a magnificent stallion, and was forced to help in the violent process of breeding Barbarossa with the mares. He survived selections for the gas chambers, a firing squad, a death march through the killing Polish winter, a strafing attack by Allied fighter-bombers and the last murderous throes of the Nazi Reich. He was liberated alongside fellow teenager Elie Wiesel, author of the compelling, best-selling novel, Night, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Of the 2,011 Jews who were rounded up by the Gestapo and deported from Cologne, Henry Oster was one of only 19 German-speaking Jewish boys to emerge alive from the concentration camps after the war. An extraordinary and utterly heart-wrenching account of one boy's determination to survive against all odds and the enduring power of love, courage, and the human spirit. | Author: Henry Oster, Dexter Ford | Publisher: Grand Central Publishing | Publication Date: Apr 04, 2023 | Number of Pages: 272 pages | Language: English | Binding: Paperback | ISBN-10: 1538741903 | ISBN-13: 9781538741900
