“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 Lódz Ghettoin 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 labour, 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.
Buy a pair of Levi’s, lose the Russian accent, and turn yourself into an American. Really, how difficult could it be?
Fake an exit visa, fool the Soviet authorities, pack enough sausage to last through immigration, buy a one-way Aeroflot ticket, and the rest will sort itself out. That was the gist of every Soviet-Jewish immigrant’s plan in the 1980s, Margarita’s included. Despite her father’s protestations that they’d get caught and thrown into a gulag, she convinced her family to follow that plan.
When they arrived in the US, Margarita had a clearly defined objective – become fully American as soon as possible, and leave her Soviet past behind. But she soon learned that finding her new voice was harder than escaping the Soviet secret police.
She finds herself changing her name to fit in, disappointing her parents who expect her to become a doctor, a lawyer, an investment banker and a classical pianist – all at the same time, learning to date without hang-ups (there is no sex in the Soviet Union), parenting her own daughter ‘while too Russian’, and not being able to let go of old habits (never, ever throw anything away because you might use it again). Most importantly, she finds that no matter how hard you try not to become your parents, you end up just like them anyway.
Witty, sharp and unflinching, I Named My Dog Pushkin will have fans of David Sedaris and Samantha Irby howling with laughter at Margarita’s catastrophes, her victories and her near misses as she learns to grow as both a woman and an immigrant in a world that often doesn’t appreciate either.
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