Charles Gardner The process of trying to get one’s head around the full depths of depravity that was the Holocaust is a daunting challenge. But the latest testimony I have read comes close.

As graphically told in The Stable Boy of Auschwitz (Thread 2023), written with Dexter Ford, Heinz Oster endured 10 long years of tortuous incarceration at the hands of the Nazis, robbing him of his entire childhood, of his parents and wider family, his freedom, education and essential food. He was on the point of starving to death when liberation finally came.

On his very first day at school, as a six-year-old, Heinz was forced to run the gauntlet of a mob of youths throwing rocks at him for being Jewish. His family was then forcibly moved to cramped conditions in a poorer part of their home city of Cologne before being transported to a ghetto in the Polish city of Lodz where his father was worked and starved to death.

Next stop was Auschwitz where his mother was wrenched from him, never to be seen again, as she was led straight to the gas chambers.

Being German speaking (most of the inmates were Polish) landed him work as a stable boy as it was the only language the horses understood. It did, at least, give him occasional access (when no-one was looking) to the oats and clover he fed the animals.

Punishment for breaking rules provided the ‘Sunday entertainment’ which involved watching miscreants hang on the gallows. When escape attempts were made, the Nazis responded with murderous reprisals, with Heinz once corralled with others into a courtyard where fellow inmates were mown down by machine-guns. He somehow miraculously got away with a relatively minor wound.

Food was so prized that finding a piece of cabbage in his soup was like winning the lottery. And he never forgot the horror on the faces of those selected for the ovens due to their growing weakness.

By January 1945, with the Red Army closing in, prisoners were taken on a long ‘death march’ with many dying en route.

They were eventually squeezed into open-top boxcars on a train bound for Buchenwald, during which they came under intense bombing by British planes who clearly mistook them for German troops, leaving an ugly bloodbath.

And from this frying pan, they were duly thrown into the ‘fire’ of Buchenwald where many starved to death. By the time American GIs, along with the Red Cross, rescued them with food and medicine, Heinz was left totally bewildered, with nowhere to go. One of 2,011 Jews deported from Cologne, he was among only 23 to survive the camps.

Thankfully, a US embassy official in neighbouring France (where he was initially sent) managed to trace an uncle of his to Los Angeles, where he eventually made his home and was able to live the ‘American dream’.

With yet another new language to learn, Heinz (now Henry as he didn’t want to be named after a ketchup!) adjusted well and eventually rose to be a Professor of Optometry after a clear case of antisemitism prevented him from pursuing his first choice of dentistry.

After being so cruelly robbed of his youth and losing belief in a God (who can blame him?) I was reminded of what Jesus said: “If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him if a large millstone were hung around his neck and he was thrown into the sea.” (Mark 9:42)

Despite vowing never to return to Germany, he eventually relented after learning how a Cologne artist, in a bid to remind citizens of the evil once committed in their midst, had erected so-called ‘stumbling blocks’ (raised plaques beside the pavement) in memory of residents, including his parents, who had been carted off to the concentration camps.

It was a case of turning an ancient antisemitic trope on its head – the custom being that if anyone tripped over a protruding cobblestone, it was because a Jew (with their big noses) must be buried there.

Jesus used the ‘stumbling-block’ phrase to denote potential obstacles to faith – the cross (1 Corinthians 1:23), Satan (Matthew 16:23) and Jesus himself (Romans 9:32f).

It seems these days that Jewish people are still a stumbling block in a Gentile world that hasn’t learnt much since those dark days of the Holocaust.

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