The Boy on the Wooden Box (12 page)

October 1944.

I am naked.

My head is shaved.

I am shivering from cold and fear.

I am surrounded by total darkness.

Gradually night turns to day. I am still naked, now sprinting past stone-faced guards, trying to prove to them how fit I am.

Another day dawns.

Now I am dressed in rags. I have no idea how long I’ve been here.

Three days?

Three weeks?

I still don’t know.

On the night we arrived from Kraków, we dragged ourselves out of the cattle cars and assembled on a vacant field. We were told to strip naked and leave our clothes where we stood. We were marched to the showers. By that time we had heard horrifying stories about showers spewing poisonous gas; but in this case, it was only icy water that dribbled out. After the shower our heads were shaved and we were sent back to the field to stand naked in the raw October night. We waited for something to happen, but nothing did. As the hours dragged by, we became colder and colder.

To find protection from the freezing night we stayed tightly packed together. I burrowed my way into the middle of the group to the warmest spot in the midst of
the bodies. If I stood still for too long, I found myself on the periphery again. Everyone was trying to do what I was, so we twisted and moved constantly, a mass of humanity jostling in a never-ending quest to avoid freezing. Finding an opening, I would wriggle my way back into the middle again. Being small for my age had its advantages.

Finally the guards shoved us into a barracks. We leaned against each other like stacked chairs. There was no room to lie down. At least with all of us packed together, it was warmer. I drifted off to sleep. The next morning we woke up in a heap, tangled together every which way. Still naked, we were assembled and processed like items of cargo. At one station we were given numbers. At the next station our body hair was shaved. When I stepped in front of the prisoner who was to shave me, he just laughed and motioned me on. I was still too frail and too malnourished to have gone through puberty. I must admit I was glad to be spared that particular humiliation.

Next we had a “medical checkup,” which consisted of our running in circles past Nazi inspectors. It was a matter of
life and death not to stumble or collapse from exhaustion. I was terrified by the inspection. Even if I passed this test, I knew I could be singled out at any moment, judged too small to do useful work and sent to my death. Somehow I made it through without falling and joined the rest of the men in our group. Eventually we were allowed to pick a few clothes from a heap of discards. I threw on a shirt and pants several sizes too big for me, grateful to have a little protection from the cold.

None of us had any idea what our being in Gross-Rosen meant. Why were we there? How had this happened? Was this part of Schindler’s plan that he had kept to himself? Was it merely temporary, or was it our last stop? Had Schindler encountered obstacles even he couldn’t overcome?

None of us knew.

All of us began to think the worst.

As our time in Gross-Rosen stretched on, we seemed more and more like the walking dead.

Mysteriously, one afternoon we were herded onto
another boxcar. The doors slammed shut and we were off into the night, the destination still uncertain. In the morning, when the doors were slid open, we saw that we had at last made it to Brünnlitz in the Sudetenland. We trudged from the train station to Schindler’s relocated labor camp. This time the camp was to produce munitions for the war. Like other camps, it had a commandant and guards, but Schindler’s presence made the critical difference. The camp consisted of a half-completed, two-story brick building. The factory was not yet ready to start producing ammunition. There weren’t any bunks for us, so we slept on straw on the second floor. After Gross-Rosen, not one of us had any complaints about our accommodations.

The fact that the factory wasn’t ready wasn’t the biggest surprise or the worst one by far. Once at Brünnlitz, we learned the women had not arrived from Kraków.

Their train had been diverted to Auschwitz.

When my father heard the news, the color drained from his face. I had never seen him so distressed. We were told that Schindler was already on his way to Auschwitz to get
the women, but it was hard to believe that even he could pull this off.

Somehow Oskar Schindler did achieve the seemingly impossible. He handed out massive bribes to the Nazis in command of Auschwitz, all the while arguing that the women were “experts,” “highly trained,” and “irreplaceable.” Incredibly, his efforts succeeded, and the women were loaded on a train, this one heading for Brünnlitz.

Rumors reached us that the women had been saved and would be arriving soon. On the day they were due, my heart raced as I stood at the factory window on the second floor, waiting for the women to appear. At last they filed into the camp. Like us, their heads were shaved and they were skin and bones. It was difficult to tell one from the other. Then I spied them. Mother! Pesza! I didn’t care how my mother and sister looked. They were alive, and that was all that mattered. I felt a rare moment of total joy.

Pesza told us that as soon as the women arrived in Auschwitz, there was a selection by the SS officers. Those
whom the Nazis judged healthy and capable of work were sent to the right; those they judged to be infirm or weak were sent to the left. At eighteen, Pesza was sent to the right with the younger, stronger women. My mother, in her early forties, was classified as useless and sent to the left, shunted to a barracks for the old and sick, the ones the Nazis didn’t bother to feed, the ones destined for the gas chamber. In the midst of this misery Schindler had performed his magic. Had Schindler arrived just a little later, it would have been too late to save not only my mother but all the women in his company who had been sent to the left.

We spent the next eight months of the war at Schindler’s munitions factory. Senior Nazis came through periodically and inspected our work. Even Amon Goeth came to visit his friend Schindler. Somehow Schindler succeeded in convincing the Nazis that we were useful and productive, even though during those eight months we were in the Brünnlitz camp, we produced almost no usable ammunition.

Though Schindler was doing all he could to provide for
us, we barely survived. With the Germans losing the war on both fronts, food became even more scarce. Our soup thinned to almost hot water. The rations of bread were smaller. I scrounged for food every day. When I found a few potato peels, I would dry them on steam pipes running through the factory and share them with David. The terrible circumstances in which we were now existing brought the two of us closer together. We tried to care for each other, and we both looked out for our father.

I also got us a bit of food from the kitchen staff. They were political prisoners who formed the camp’s underground resistance. Because they were from the city of Budzy’n, near my hometown of Narewka, they spoke Yiddish with the same dialect I did. When I had the chance, I liked to hang around and talk with them, and we became friendly. They cooked the daily soup in big kettles. To wash the kettles, they swished water around inside them and then dumped it out. The workers agreed to let me collect the leftover water in a can. I set the can on a steam pipe until the water evaporated, leaving bits of solid
food in the bottom. Somehow I could always be inventive when it came to getting a little extra to eat.

David and I worked in the tool and die room with our father. My skills had improved under my father’s tutelage, and I could now perform the tasks of a more experienced craftsman. Schindler kept to his usual schedule, entertaining until the early morning hours and then making his rounds in the factory. Sometimes he would ask me to come up to his office. The first time I climbed those stairs, my whole body was shaking. What could he possibly want with me? I tried and tried to think of what I had done wrong. By the time I reached Schindler’s office, I was so afraid I scarcely heard him as he attempted to calm me with small talk. Then he handed me a piece of bread and I knew I would be all right. Schindler did not invite me upstairs often; but when he did, I always split the “bounty” with my father and brother.

One time, after Schindler had paused to talk to me at my workstation, he ordered the person who drew up the work schedule to transfer me to the day shift. That change probably
saved my life. The day shift was far easier mentally and physically. I wonder if Schindler realized the gift he had given me. Not surprisingly, not all my fellow prisoners were pleased about this special treatment, though my father and David were genuinely happy for me.

Schindler told us about movements on the eastern front. Early in 1945, we knew that the Soviet army had liberated Auschwitz and Kraków. The more geographically knowledgeable of the prisoners sketched maps in the dirt, charting the Soviet army’s advance. Their maps made the progress seem more real. It wouldn’t be long, they said, before the army would reach us.

With the outcome all but decided, in those last months of the war it might have seemed that we would have felt a sense of optimism, but by spring of 1945, we were completely exhausted, totally depleted of any reserve of energy; our spirits were shattered, our bodies barely alive. My father could no longer stand at his machine for his twelve-hour shift. He had to squat down when no one was looking. David developed sores on his legs that wouldn’t heal. I
began to have double vision. I had to read measuring markings on my machine, and sometimes I simply couldn’t; the fine lines on the instruments looked like tiny wiggly worms.

I don’t know why, perhaps simply because the six years of stress and suffering had finally caught up with me, but I couldn’t let go of the thought that obsessed me, that I would be shot with the last bullet of the war. I played out the nightmare over and over in my mind—the last day, the last hour, the last minute, liberation so close, then my luck would run out.

Really, my fears were not so far-fetched. It’s good that I didn’t know until later that in April 1945, the SS was ordered to murder all the Jewish workers at the factory, but Schindler managed to thwart the plan and get the SS officer in charge transferred out of the area before he could carry out the instructions. By that time German officers and soldiers were fleeing, doing their utmost to avoid capture by the rapidly approaching Soviet army. In the midst of the chaos Schindler again seized an opportunity to act on our behalf. He went to one of the abandoned
Nazi warehouses and brought back hundreds of bolts of navy-blue cloth and hundreds of bottles of vodka.

With the danger of capture by the Soviets imminent, Schindler knew he had to flee. First, he made it clear to the guards that they would have a better chance of survival if they left on their own. They needed no further encouragement. The soldiers fled without a word, but Schindler remained. He could not bring himself to leave without saying good-bye and gathered his Jews together one last time. After so many years of constant fear, I struggled to believe what he was saying could really be true.

“You are free,” he told us.

Free!

We were speechless. What was there to say? What words could possibly express the tumult of emotions we were feeling? Freedom seemed like an impossible fantasy. Before he left, Schindler asked that we not take revenge on the people in the nearby town, since they had helped him to keep us alive. He gave each of us a bolt of cloth and a bottle of vodka, goods he knew we could barter for
food, shelter, and clothes. I didn’t have a chance personally to say good-bye to Schindler, but I joined with all the other workers in presenting him with a ring, made from a prisoner’s gold tooth, which bore an inscription in Hebrew from the Talmud: “He who saves a life saves the world entire.”

Just after midnight, Oskar Schindler sped off in his car. His goal was to reach the American lines, which he did. Had the Soviets captured him, they would have seen him only as a Nazi and would have killed him.

We waited in limbo after Schindler’s departure for the arrival of the Soviets. Our guards had not hesitated to abandon their posts; we could have left, and yet we didn’t. We had no news, no place to go, and no idea what would await us outside the camp. It was strangely quiet, like being in the eye of the storm. Some young people took up the weapons abandoned by the guards and performed sentry duty. Night fell with none of us knowing what our next move should be.

On May 8, 1945, the answer came. A lone Russian
soldier rode up to the gates. He asked who we were; we answered we were Jews from Poland. He said we were free and told us to tear the numbers and triangles off our uniforms. As I think back to that moment, it seems like we ripped them off in unison, an affirmation of our solidarity and victory.

Despite impossible odds, we had made it. Miraculously, Oskar Schindler, this complex man of many contradictions—Nazi opportunist, schemer, courageous maverick, rescuer, hero—had saved nearly 1,200 Jews from almost certain death.

AFTER THE SOLDIER LEFT, THE gates swung open. I was in shock. We all were. We had gone from years of imprisonment to freedom. I felt confused, weak, and ecstatic all at once.