The Horse Adjutant

The Horse Adjutant is the wartime story of Leon Schagrin who was 12 years old when the Nazis invaded and occupied his hometown of Grybow in southern Poland. Leon's father was a self-trained veterinarian, caring for local livestock. This placed Leon in close contact with horses from an early age. The skills he learned provided him with something of value to the Nazis and put him at the center of some of their most infamous crimes.
While Leon is caring for horses his family, four sisters and a baby brother, along with his father and mother, 200 cousins and the entire region of South Poland were sent to the extermination camp at Belzec where over 600,000 people were killed in a single year!
Leon survived as a laborer in a quarry until he was sent to the ghetto at Tarnow where as youth driver of a horse carriage he became the preferred driver of Hauptsturmführer Blache, the Nazi Commandant of Tarnow ghetto and witnessed the extermination of the ghetto. He, himself, was rescued from a mass grave and sent to another concentration camp at Szebnia where he continued working with horses. After a short stay in Szebnia Leon was stripped shipped naked and with hundreds of other slave laborers in cattle cars to Auschwitz-Birkenau where he was further witness to the atrocities of the Nazis. Finally, assigned to work in the Buna Camp of the IG Farben industrial plant, Leon was wounded in an air raid bombing of the plant. Later when this forced the evacuation of the camp followed by the death march he remained as a wounded prisoner. In this weakened condition he survived days with no food until the Russian Army liberated the camp in 1945.
At each location Leon was both victim and witness to the Nazi Holocaust and his story is filled with dramatic instances of degradation, humanity and the kindness of strangers that kept him alive.