The Boy from Baby House 10

September 15, 2009
The media have brought to the publics attention the often horrific conditions of overcrowded and understaffed Russian orphanages. This remarkable and eye-opening memoir distills that information down to one child, Vanya, born in 1990 to an alcoholic mother and sent 18 months later to Baby House 10, an orphanage housing 62 children from birth to 5 years old. Diagnosed with cerebral palsy, Vanya was largely neglected by the staff, toys and medical treatment were withheld, and by age five he was labeled uneducable. In 1994 Sarah, the wife of an American journalist who speaks Russian herself, is taken to Baby House 10, which she immediately perceives as a dead-end for the children living there, especially those born with a handicap. She becomes attached to the surprisingly verbal Vanya, and works with a young Russian woman to find him an adoptive family. They finally succeed, after five years of hopes dashed and bureaucratic tangles. Vanya, aka John Lahutsky, is now a Boy Scout and honors student living in Pennsylvania, the survivor of this shocking, uplifting, and memorable journey.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2009
Muckraking memoir exposes Russia's nightmarish orphan-care system.

Aided by British journalist Philps, Lahutsky recounts his experiences in the"children's gulag," a Stalinist-era relic that operates to this day. Now a high-school student living with his adoptive mother in Pennsylvania, at the time the book opens Lahutsky was a toddler named Vanya, abandoned by his birth mother and diagnosed with cerebral palsy. He was sent to the titular orphanage, a decrepit human warehouse whose head doctor was a superstitious peasant rather than a medical professional. Children with physical disabilities like Vanya's were routinely declared mentally retarded by Russian authorities, then consigned to orphanages where therapy was nonexistent. But Baby House 10 was the Taj Mahal compared to the internat (asylum) to which Vanya was later shuttled to spend the rest of his life. A hellhole in which children were sedated and left in steel-barred cribs soiled with their own urine and feces, the internat spurred reporter Philps, his wife and some humane Russian caregivers to make heroic efforts to save Vanya. The book details his tortuous ordeal with the Russian state bureaucracy and an aborted adoption by a British family, as well as his ultimate connection with a loving American mother. None of his setbacks snuffed out Vanya's indefatigable resilience, which was his salvation and comprises the most remarkable part of his story.

An emotionally draining but haunting document of human cruelty, kindness and survival.

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