The Stable Boy of Auschwitz

The Stable Boy of Auschwitz 

By Henry Oster, Dexter Ford 

Narrated by: William Hope, Susan Oster, Dexter Ford and Henry Oster

Listening length: 6 hours, 59 minutes 

Release date: April 4, 2023 

My review: 4.5 out of 5 stars

"Hunger gnawed at my insides. I couldn’t last much longer. But just as I was beginning to give up, I found myself in the Auschwitz stables, with rows of stalls filled with horses. Barbarossa was a towering, beautiful stallion. He only responded to commands in German, and as the only German-speaking boy, I was chosen as his caretaker. I felt an ember of hope. If I could make myself useful, helping these horses, maybe I could stay alive.”

Henry Oster was just five years old when Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. One of the 2,011 Jews who were rounded up by the Gestapo and deported from Cologne, he was one of only 23 to emerge alive from the concentration camps after the war.

A heart-wrenching and inspirational true account of a courageous little boy who, against all odds, after losing almost everything a human being can lose, survived to tell his story.

Torn from their home, Henry and his parents were deported to the Łódź Ghetto in Poland, a concentration camp within a city. Then, one terrifying day, after losing his father to starvation, Henry found himself and his mom herded onto a stifling, filth-ridden cattle car, on a ride to a place whose name has come to symbolize the worst of humanity: Auschwitz.

Nazis ripped Henry apart from his mother in the shuffling river of children, women, and men stepping off the train. For the first time in his life, Henry was completely alone.

Assigned to work in the Auschwitz stables, breeding horses, Henry had to tend his mares, Mutti, Olga, and the stallion Barbarossa from dawn into the night. It was back-breaking labor, but Henry clung to the belief that if he made himself hard to replace, he might just stay alive. With crippling hunger pains, Henry fed the horses each day, knowing that if he were caught pocketing a carrot or cramming some grain into his mouth, he would face the hangman.

Through it all—from finding ways to escape being selected for death in the Auschwitz/Birkenau gas chambers, to surviving a machine-gun firing squad, to enduring a brutal death march through the bleak Polish winter—Henry somehow found the strength and the will to keep on going.

How did one starving little boy, alone and forgotten, survive this ultimate hell on earth? The Kindness of the Hangman is the heart-breaking, mesmerizing, and unforgettable true story that will destroy your faith in humanity. And then build it back up again.

This book was originally published as The Kindness of the Hangman.




While I received a copy of this audiobook in exchange for my review, all opinions remain my own. Thank you Netgalley and Bookouture Audio for the opportunity to listen to this story.

I love reading stories of the holocaust. Well, love is the wrong word, but I think it is important for people to keep reading these stories because I do believe "Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it." This book is the true story of a holocaust survivor. This book is named for one of the "jobs" he held while in Auschwitz, helping to care for the horses of the Nazi's. This story of survival and also of his ability to come to America after and go on to live a long life, it did soothe my heart a little. Henry went on in his life to speak out regularly about his time during the holocaust, his story. It really is an amazing tale of survival.

The Mercy of the Sky

The Mercy of the Sky:
The Story of a Tornado

By Holly Bailey
Narrated by Erin Bennett
Listening length: 10 hours, 37 minutes
Publication date: May 12, 2015
My review: 4 out of 5 stars

The Mercy of the Sky is the harrowing inside account of Oklahoma's deadliest tornado, penned by a local writer who became a national correspondent.

Oklahomans have long been known for their fatalism and grit, but even old-timers are troubled by the twisters that are devastating the state with increasing frequency. On May 20, 2013, the worst tornado on record landed a direct hit on the small town of Moore, destroying two schools while the children cowered inside.

Oklahoma native Holly Bailey grew up dreaming of becoming a storm chaser. Instead she became Newsweek's youngest-ever White House correspondent, traveling to war zones with Presidents Bush and Obama. When Moore was hit, Bailey went back both as a journalist and a hometown girl and spoke with the teachers who put their lives at risk to save their students, the weathermen more revered than rock stars and more tormented than they let on, and many shell-shocked residents. In The Mercy of the Sky, Bailey does for the Oklahoma flatlands what Sebastian Junger did for Gloucester, Massachusetts, in The Perfect Storm, telling a dramatic, pause-register story about a town that must survive the elements - or die.

This was the incredible story of town that is repeatedly hit by tornados. On May 20, 2013, the worst tornado on record hit the town destroying not one, but two schools. This book tells the story in such detail it is almost as if you are there. I couldn't help but gasp at points which required me to tell my husband about unbelievable parts of this book... he now has it on his list of books to read (or listen to). You won't believe what this town lived through. I don't know that I could ever live with the unpredictability of tornado alley. For now, I will stay "safe-ish" in my valley. 

There are graphic parts to this story, so caution should be used when listening or reading, especially if you are sensitive to this. There are details of the deaths of several individuals including a young child. It was incredibly hard to listen to, but it is something that happens and something I think we all need to be aware that people live through. The author did an amazing job of making sure to tell the truth of these people's lives in the best way she could.

The Daughter of Auschwitz

The Daughter of Auschwitz: A Memoir

By Tova Friedman and Malcolm Braban
Narrated by Saskia Maarleveld
Publishication date: September 6, 2022
Listening length: 7 hours, 53 minutes
My review: 4 out of 5 stars 

Read for my March 2023 Reading challenge, bonus prompt 3: Memoir by a woman or no-binary person. 

A powerful memoir by one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, Tova Friedman, following her childhood growing up during the Holocaust and surviving a string of near-death experiences in a Jewish ghetto, a Nazi labor camp, and Auschwitz.

"I am a survivor. That comes with a survivor's obligation to represent one and half million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. They cannot speak. So I must speak on their behalf."

Tova Friedman was one of the youngest people to emerge from Auschwitz. After surviving the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Central Poland where she lived as a toddler, Tova was four when she and her parents were sent to a Nazi labour camp, and almost six when she and her mother were forced into a packed cattle truck and sent to Auschwitz II, also known as the Birkenau extermination camp, while her father was transported to Dachau.

During six months of incarceration in Birkenau, Tova witnessed atrocities that she could never forget, and experienced numerous escapes from death. She is one of a handful of Jews to have entered a gas chamber and lived to tell the tale.

As Nazi killing squads roamed Birkenau before abandoning the camp in January 1945, Tova and her mother hid among corpses. After being liberated by the Russians they made their way back to their hometown in Poland. Eventually Tova's father tracked them down and the family was reunited.

In The Daughter of Auschwitz, Tova immortalizes what she saw, to keep the story of the Holocaust alive, at a time when it's in danger of fading from memory. She has used those memories that have shaped her life to honour the victims. Written with award-winning former war reporter Malcolm Brabant, this is an extremely important book. Brabant's meticulous research has helped Tova recall her experiences in searing detail. Together they have painstakingly recreated Tova's extraordinary story about the world's worst ever crime.

Another amazing story of survival in the face of tremendous tragedy. As Americans, I don't think we can begin to imagine what the people went through during the Holocaust, but this is one way we can try to understand, by reading first-hand accounts. Tova is one of the youngest survivors to come out of Auschwitz. This is her story. 

If you can listen to nothing else, listen to the foreword of this book. The author has a warning for us: 

“in this age of warp-speed internet, change can happen much faster than it did eighty years ago. We need to be constantly vigilant and brave enough to speak out."

Some of my the most shocking revelations to me were from the introduction. Tova mentions a Survey commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, published in September 2020: in a survey of young Americans two-thirds of people interviewed didn't know how many Jews died during the Holocaust (over six million), almost half couldn't name a single concentration camp or ghetto, 23% believed the Holocaust had been a myth or exaggerated, and 17% said it was acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views. 

as American philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We need to remember what has happened so that we don't ever have anything like this happen again. 

When asked how our current world compares to the Europe of the 1930's, Tova writes: 

It's true that no government in the world today has such a doctrine enshrined in law and supported by the population at large. Nevertheless, we all know countries where discrimination is prevalent and perhaps even tolerated. 

Only 80 years ago, over 6 million Jewish people were murdered simply because they were Jewish and there is every possibility that we could be headed down a very similar road today. In this book, Tova tells of the many things that her brave mother did to ensure her safety, her survival. It is apparent that without her, the story would have come out quite differently. Now in her mid-80s, Tova sees it as her responsibility to speak out about the Holocaust, to represent the 1.5 million Jewish children who never lived to see the end of the war.  

The holocaust, the worst crime in the history of mankind, happened less than 80 years ago, and it is fading from memory already... that, quite frankly, is appalling. 

Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens

Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens

By Steve Olson

Narrated by Jonathan Yen

Published March 7, 2016

Listening length: 8 hours 34 minutes 

My review 3.5 out of 5 stars 

Survival narrative meets scientific, natural, and social history in the riveting story of a volcanic disaster. For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, and ordinary people listened anxiously to rumblings in the longquiescent volcano Mount St. Helens. Still, when a massive explosion took the top off the mountain, no one was prepared. Fifty-seven people died, including newlywed logger John Killian (for years afterward, his father searched for him in the ash), scientist Dave Johnston, and celebrated local curmudgeon Harry Truman. The lives of many others were forever changed. Steve Olson interweaves history, science, and vivid personal stories of the volcano's victims and survivors to portray the disaster as a multifaceted turning point. Powerful economic, political, and historical forces influenced who died when the volcano erupted, and their deaths marked the end of an era in the Pacific Northwest. The eruption of Mount St. Helens transformed volcanic science, the study of environmental resilience, and our perceptions of how to survive on an increasingly dangerous planet.

This was the very informative story not only of the eruption of Mt St Helens, but of all the people around it. Lots of details about the Weyerhaeuser family and how they got their start in the Northwest logging industry. How they came to be on that mountain during that time. Many of the fatalities of that day are described, some in detail, so be aware of that detail if you read this book. I just thought it was good for me to know more about the mountain that blew up on my birthday (only four years early!) I loved hearing about all the details of what the scientists were seeing (and feeling) the months and weeks leading up to the eruption. Even the details of the day of the blast were new to me. I've seen pictures and heard my family's stories, but never details like this. It was a book worth listening to for me.