ebooks Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World by Colin Wells in History

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The Kindness of the Hangman is the inspiring true story of a young German boy; Henry Oster; and his struggle for survival against Nazi persecution; slave labor; starvation and the threat of extermination.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. Even though Henry's father was a wounded; decorated German soldier in World War I; the Nazis' cruel obsession with Jews turned the Oster's lives into a spiral of persecution and desperation. Henry and his family were ostracized; vilified and brutalized.They were torn from their home and deported to the infamous Lodz; Poland Ghetto; where desperate Jews 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 earn them a date with 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 Oster somehow found the strength to stay alive. He and 130 other boys were 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.As the Allied armies closed in on Berlin Henry was finally liberated; on the razor's edge of starvation; from the Buchenwald concentration camp by General George Patton's 3rd Army; among them sobbing African-American soldiers who understood the prejudice and injustice he had suffered for so many years. 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 is the only person still alive to tell their story. He was one of only 19 German-speaking Jewish boys to emerge alive from the concentration camps after the war.Oster's struggles did not stop with his escape from the Nazis' persecution. After coming of age as a free young man in Paris he made his way to Los Angeles; arriving with no money; no English and no education. By pumping gas and fixing cars after school he worked his way through high school and UCLA; and became an influential and respected Professor of Optometry. At the age of 85 he was still seeing patients; helping the world to see. In 2011 Henry made a moving and triumphant return to Cologne; where he spoke before the Mayor; city officials; diplomats and Holocaust historians; and visited the Gunter Demnig art project of sidewalk plaques—"stumbling stones"—that memorialize his mother and father.Now; at the age of 87; Henry Oster is just as vibrant and determined as ever to tell the story of one of the last few survivors of the Nazi death camps; and to caution students and audiences all over the world about the racism; fascism and politics of fear that gave rise to the Nazi nightmanre; and which are still alive and well in otherwise civilized societies today.