A Review of "The Horse Adjutant"

“Son, if you survive, tell the story of everything that happened to us. The world must know. .. you will live longer than any of us.” These are the last words that Leon Schagrin’s father ever said to him. It was to be that last that Schagrin would ever hear from his family before they were separated. At age 12 Leon was alone. The rest of the family died in Belzac, the only camp with a single purpose- to kill everyone who arrived. Leon survived thanks to a miraculous series of twists and turns that would allow him to live to see liberation. Leon Shagrin’s story is told in The Horse Adjutant, co-authored by Stephen Shooster, (2011, Shooster Publishing, www. thehorseadjutant.com) A highly personal narrative, Leon tells us of pre-war Poland- the story of his childhood- in the small town of Grybow in which Jews, Christians, Gypsies, and Russians lived side by side. They went to the same schools, they played together, and they went to market day together. Leon was a rambunctious child who would rather wander the hills and forests than go to school. Leon’s narrative of his childhood recalls a peaceful place, a great place with all kinds of secrets to be discovered. By the time that he was old enough to become a Bar Mitzvah that world would be replaced by a hellish limbo filled with unexplained atrocities. As a boy Leon was always ready to find an excuse to get out of helping his father, a self-taught veterinarian who had a special gift for treating horses. Ironically, it would be the little that he did learn about horses that would save him more than once. Being a coach driver for the SS Leon would be able to get a little food. Caring for an officer’s prize steed would keep him from the gas chamber. But his ability to handle horses also forced him to witness the extermination of his neighbors. After the Nazis killed people on the street just to make a point of their cruelty Leon would be ordered to bring a wagon and take the bodies away. Leon’s narrative records his day to day struggle to live and his desperate hope to escape Auschwitz. He hoped to be assigned to a work camp rather than a death camp. His daily fight to ward of starvation, beatings, and selection punctuate the story of how he lived to tell his story. While I think many of us who study the Holocaust try to deal with the “big picture,” a story like The Horse Adjutant reminds us that it is easy to miss the tree as one tries to understand the forest. None of us can ever comprehend the death of six million. As we try to comprehend that number we lose sight of the loss of six million individual lives- the number is just too great and defies our ability to understand. A highly personal narrative, The Horse Adjutant reminds us that sometimes our greatest understanding is found in the details of a single life. Perhaps the individual stories let us begin the task of recovering the individual faces of a world that was destroyed. The Horse Adjutant is a must read. It will not teach you about the great battles of the war. It will not explain how human beings could kill without remorse. It will not tell you why Leon’s world was destroyed. It will tell you how one single boy managed to survive to tell us how beautiful his world once was.