The Boy on the Wooden Box (10 page)

Through the barbed-wire fences surrounding the camp, I could look out and sometimes see the children of the German officers strutting back and forth, wearing their
Hitler Youth uniforms and singing songs praising the Führer, Adolf Hitler. They were so exuberant, so full of life, while just a few yards away from them I was exhausted and depressed, struggling to survive another day. Only the thickness of the barbed wire separated my life in hell from their lives of freedom, but we might as well have been on separate planets. I couldn’t begin to understand the injustice of it all.

As the months dragged on, I despaired. I didn’t dare risk trying to see my father or mother again, not because I feared for myself, but because I feared the punishment that would come to them if I were discovered in their barracks. My first reaction to Płaszów, that I would never leave alive, was reinforced every day. Any day, I thought, my luck would run out and I’d be killed, either by Goeth or by one of his accomplices. I’d be a number in that day’s score. Goeth was a stout man with an arrogant sneer and a bully’s swagger. His chilling stare haunted me and filled not only my waking hours but my nightmares. Even when he was nowhere in sight, I felt his eyes on me.

During the day from time to time, I would see my brother or father at a distance, heading from one job to another, and the brief sighting would give me a sliver of hope. All too soon that hope would drain away.

Although Schindler had not hired me, I did have a bit of good luck. The brush factory where I had worked in the ghetto had been relocated to Płaszów, and I was assigned to the twelve-hour night shift. I was relieved to have a steady job and an official place to go. Being idle or waiting for random work assignments only invited trouble.

Working in the brush factory also meant I could be inside, where it was warmer, instead of outside chopping ice or shoveling snow. Yet the brush factory too had its horrors. One time while I was at work, a guard singled me out. I had been promoted from gluing on the bristles to fastening the wooden halves of a brush together with brads. It was meticulous and demanding work, but I had a knack for it. The guard watched me work and then pointed a gun at my head. “If the next brad is crooked, I’ll shoot
you,” he said. I didn’t pause or look up. I just kept working and fastened the halves together with the brad. Cautiously I moved the finished product toward him to inspect. It was straight. He walked away, and I continued working as if nothing had happened. Somehow, I don’t know how, I kept my emotions under control.

A few nights later Amon Goeth stomped into the factory with his two dogs, Ralf and Rolf, and a squad of his flunkies. Bored and probably drunk, he pulled his pistol out of its holster and shot our foreman—simply shot him, at point-blank range, for absolutely no reason. As the foreman crumpled to the floor, blood pooling under his head, Goeth turned his attention to us.

Waving the gun, he yelled an order at his men, who divided us into two groups. Somehow I knew this separation was not a good thing. Sure enough, I found myself on the wrong side once again, assigned to a group of children and older workers. In other words, assigned to the group deemed expendable. Goeth and his men marched back and forth, debating something, I couldn’t hear
what. When their backs were turned, I held my breath and sneaked over to the other group, the one made up of stronger workers. If Goeth had seen me, he surely would have shot me or ended my life in an even worse way. Soon it didn’t matter which group I was in. After a few minutes, Goeth lost interest. He holstered his gun, and as abruptly as he had entered the factory, he left, his two dogs trailing him out the door. We stood in our groups for another half an hour, too terrified to move. Finally one of the guards told us to go to our barracks. Once there, many of the men broke down, sobbing, realizing how close we had come to death. This time I didn’t cry. I had grown numb to what might happen to me, to whatever my fate might be.

In late 1943, Schindler cajoled and bribed Goeth and other SS leaders for permission to build a sub-camp on the property adjacent to Emalia. He argued that it would be far more efficient if workers were a few steps from the factory instead of wasting precious time marching the two and a half miles between Emalia and the camp. The
hours lost in forming lines and walking back and forth between the factory and Płaszów could be better spent producing goods and making a profit. The Schindler sub-camp was built, and in the spring of 1944, my father and David moved there. I learned through the camp network that Pesza had also been assigned to a similar sub-camp on the property of the electrical factory where she worked. My mother and I were alone once again, as we had been in the ghetto, but this was much worse—partly because I was separated from her, partly because this was such a terrible, dangerous place. I sank into deeper despair.

When word passed through the camp that Schindler planned to add thirty Jews to his workforce, I didn’t think anything about it. However, a few days later I learned that a list had been created, and my name was on it, along with my mother’s. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed too good to be true. After a year of trying, had my father finally succeeded in getting us into Schindler’s factory?

I counted off the days until we were to leave. Finally able
to see a way out of the Płaszów inferno, I felt stronger in spirit if not in body. Luckily, my spirit willed my body to keep on going. The day before our scheduled transfer came a crushing blow. My supervisor at the brush factory told me my name had been crossed off the transfer list. I was to stay at my current job in Płaszów. No words can express the absolute terror I felt. Having been given a little ray of hope, the loss of it was worse than not having had it at all. I knew I wouldn’t survive the next month in Płaszów, let alone the next year. I was starving. I lived in constant fear. I found myself cowering at the slightest sound or movement. What could I do? How could I go on?

The day the new “Schindler Jews” were to leave for the sub-camp, I sneaked away from my job at the brush factory to see my mother off. It was a miracle that nobody stopped me as I walked across the camp toward the gates where those who were going to the sub-camp had assembled. I moved closer, telling myself I had to act. I couldn’t let this last opportunity disappear. I had no future in Płaszów. I might as well die attempting to be with my mother. My
last few steps put me in front of the German officer in charge of the transfer. My eyes were on a level with his enormous belt buckle adorned with a large Nazi swastika. I am sure this man was one of the ones who roamed the camp shooting people, either following Goeth’s orders or just for his own perverse entertainment. I gulped and made my case to him in German. “I am on the list,” I told him, “but somebody crossed my name off.” The man didn’t respond.

In an effort to strengthen my case, I said, “My mother’s on the list.”

What gave me the audacity to speak to him as if he were a person capable of seeing reason, I’ll never know.

As if that wasn’t enough, I added, “My father and brother are already there.”

I couldn’t have put my life at greater risk.

I waited. Agonizing second followed agonizing second as the officer seemed to ponder what to do with me. I was lucky he thought at all and didn’t just pull out his gun and shoot me, resolving in a second the dilemma presented to
him by this little Jewish boy. He motioned for his assistant to bring over the list. I pointed to my crossed-out name. “That’s my name right there,” I told him. The officer peered down at me, grunted, and signaled for me to join the group of workers leaving for Schindler’s sub-camp.

For some mysterious reason, he responded as if he saw me as a regular human being who had made a reasonable request. Did he take pity on me, a boy separated from his family? Did he see one of his own children in me? Was he simply being a bureaucrat who didn’t like the fact that a name had been crossed out without his official permission? There’s no way of knowing. People like him could do whatever they wanted, show mercy or its opposite.

My legs quaking, I quickly made my way into the group and found my mother. She had been standing near the front, staring straight ahead as commanded, completely unaware of what was causing the delay at the back of the group. She could hardly contain her joy as I quietly appeared beside her and slid my hand into hers. We somehow managed to stand silently, scarcely breathing,
not wanting to draw attention to ourselves. We waited for what seemed like an eternity until the gate opened. Finally our group started to move, and I dared to think my time in hell might at last be coming to an end.

ONCE AGAIN I WALKED THROUGH Kraków in a daze, this time unable to believe my good fortune. Had I
really
escaped Płaszów? Was I
really
standing beside my mother? Would we
really
be reunited with my father and brother? All these questions and a dozen others raced through my mind as our group of thirty approached the Emalia factory. I kept my head down, my eyes focused on the pavement. I was petrified that when we finally arrived at the Emalia sub-camp, Goeth would somehow be there and send me back to Płaszów. I convinced myself that if I
didn’t look at anyone, no would look at me, no one would notice me. I knew from experience that invisibility was the closest I could get to safety. As my mother and I walked together, I could imagine my gentile friends nearby, still going to school, still playing the streetcar game, but I did not lift my eyes even for a quick peek.

I saw Schindler’s factory ahead of us. As we drew closer, I tensed and squeezed my mother’s hand hard. What I saw was not the nondescript factory building it had been when my father first worked there. Encircled by an electric fence with imposing metal gates, Emalia now had a sinister look. SS guards, as frightening as the officer who had recently grunted me into the Schindler group, stood sentry at the entrance. For a few moments I feared that my life might not be any different here than in Płaszów.

But once we passed through the entrance, my spirits rose. The outside of the factory was a façade to placate the Nazis. Inside, the atmosphere was very different. As in Płaszów, men and women were housed in separate barracks, but unlike Płaszów, we were allowed to visit each
other. SS guards were not permitted to enter any barracks without Schindler’s permission. There was slightly better food—at midday, a bowl of real soup, perhaps a slice of vegetable, and at the end of the night shift, bread with oleo. By no means were those two scant meals enough to satisfy my hunger, but they were more than I had ever been given in Płaszów, more than I’d had at one time in nearly two years.

Soon after entering the camp, David and my father found my mother and me. We rushed to hug each other. At that moment, in my father’s eyes, I saw a hint of his old pride. He had succeeded in reuniting five of us and keeping us alive, at least for now. “You’ll work with David and me,” he informed me with authority. I stared at my brother, whom I had glimpsed only a few times in two years. He was now sixteen and had grown to be almost as tall as my father, but his cheeks were hollow and his clothes hung loosely on his bony frame. “You’ll be fine,” David reassured me.

At long last, my mother and father could again talk with
each other one on one. Their hushed conversations were brief but reassuring. Father shared his best news with me, too. Pesza was alive. Father had exchanged messages with her through a contact at the electrical works, but there was still nothing about Hershel or our other relatives in Narewka. Nor was there any news of Tsalig. “He could be out there,” I once said to my father, my voice trailing off as the unlikelihood of this sank in. My father said nothing in reply.

I was permitted to stay in the same barracks as my father and brother. The terrible isolation and loneliness that had plagued me receded. The three of us shared a bunk, with David and me on the top and my father on the bottom. The Emalia factory operated around the clock, with mostly non-Jews working days and Schindler’s Jews assigned to the night shifts. Schindler had expanded his factory beyond pots and pans to producing war material. My brother and I worked through the nights on a machine that made casings for the detonators on bombs. Our shifts were twelve hours, with no breaks for meals. At times I
struggled to stay awake doing the repetitive work. If I looked like I might drift off, David nudged me and vice versa. At dawn I ate my ration of bread, returned to the barracks, and fell exhausted into my bunk.

It was on the “Jewish shift,” as the night shift came to be called, that I began to know Schindler personally. I had heard plenty of stories about the wild parties he threw in his offices on the second floor of the factory, parties that went late into the night. Now, at my workstation, I could hear the laughter and music. After the festivities, Schindler still had the energy to make his rounds of the factory. When he entered our work area, I could smell his cigarettes and cologne before I saw him. Always elegantly dressed, he would meander across the room, stopping to chat with men working at different stations. He had an uncanny ability to remember names. I had grown used to the fact that to the Nazis, I was just another Jew; my name didn’t matter. But Schindler was different. He clearly wanted to know who we were. He acted like he cared about us as individuals. Sometimes he paused at David’s
and my machine and struck up a conversation. Tall and hefty, with a booming voice, he would ask me how I was doing, how many pieces I had made that night. He stood quietly waiting for my answer. He looked me in the eye, not with the blank, unseeing stare of the Nazis, but with genuine interest and even a glint of humor. I was so small that I had to stand on an overturned wooden box to reach the controls of the machine. Schindler seemed to get a kick out of that.