The Boy on the Wooden Box (9 page)

I found my friends Yossel and Samuel already there. In the chaos of our move to Ghetto A, I had lost track of them. They had managed to survive on their own without their parents, but now we were all caught in limbo. They
whispered to me, “We’re going to hide like we did before. You should come with us.”

I thought about going with them and returning to our narrow hiding place in the rafters of the shed, but something stopped me. I’m not sure why I felt the pull so strongly, but I knew I had to be with my mother. She and I had been through so much together. She was my strength and I was hers. So I told Yossel and Samuel, “I’m going to try something else.”

I spotted another group of workers and attempted to blend into their ranks. Once again we inched toward the gate of the ghetto. And once again, as I came close, the same guard spotted me and pulled me out, shoving me away from the departing group. Although I knew it was risky, I loitered as close to the gates as possible, waiting for a moment when I might be able to dart through them. At long last, the guard was called away. I saw my chance and joined another group. With a lump in my throat, I moved forward, closer and closer to the exit, desperately hoping the guard would not reappear. As I reached
the gate, two officers waved me through, and I was now among those headed to Płaszów. My heart was racing. All I wanted was to see my family again, no matter what the situation.

As I walked out of the ghetto with its tombstone-crowned walls and along the streets of Kraków, I was dumbfounded to see that life seemed just as it had been before I entered the ghetto. It was as if I were in a time warp . . . or as if the ghetto were on another planet. I stared at the clean, well-dressed people, busily moving from place to place. They seemed so normal, so happy. Had they not known what we had been suffering just a few blocks away? How could they
not
have known? How could they not have done something to help us? A streetcar stopped, and passengers boarded, oblivious to our presence. They showed absolutely no interest in who we were, where we were going, or why. That our misery, confinement, and pain were irrelevant to their lives was simply incomprehensible.

As we neared the Płaszów camp a short while later, I was still overjoyed I had succeeded in leaving the ghetto.
All that mattered to me was that I would be with my family again. As I entered the chaos of Płaszów, I saw before me a world far worse than I ever could have imagined, far worse than I ever thought possible. Stepping through those gates was like arriving at the innermost circle of hell.

MY FIRST IMPRESSION OF PŁASZÓW as hell on earth never changed. I only needed one look to see that this was an entirely foreign place. No matter how difficult life had been in the ghetto, at least outwardly it had appeared a familiar world. Yes, we were packed like sardines into too few rooms, but those rooms were in normal apartment buildings. There were streets and sidewalks and the sounds of a city beyond the walls.

Płaszów was an alien world. It was built on two Jewish cemeteries that the Nazis had desecrated and destroyed.
It was barren, dismal, chaotic. Rocks, dirt, barbed wire, ferocious dogs, menacing guards, and acre after acre of drab barracks stretched as far as I could see. Hundreds of prisoners in threadbare clothing hurried from one work detail to another, threatened by gun-wielding German and Ukrainian guards. The moment I entered the gates of Płaszów, I was convinced I would never leave alive.

Immediately, the guards divided our group by gender. I shuffled into my assigned barracks on the men’s side of the camp. My hope of finding my family plummeted when I learned that I was to stay there indefinitely. I had no idea where my father and David might be. With only my precious thermos bottle, my legacy from Mr. Luftig, and my blanket, I crawled onto a narrow wood shelf and lay down. Famished but with no prospect of food, in a cramped room filled with strangers, mercifully, I quickly sank into the oblivion of sleep.

All too soon lights flashed on. Although it was still pitch-black outside, guards beat with their sticks on the bunks and shouted at us, “
Steh auf! Steh auf!
” “Get up! Get up!”
It was time to assemble for work assignments. Half asleep, I got down from the shelf and joined my group along with row upon row of prisoners from the other barracks. We stood in the dark and cold for hours; we were counted, counted again, randomly abused—verbally, physically, or both—threatened, counted again, and finally assigned to work. The work was both menial and dangerous. Most days I hauled lumber, rocks, and dirt to build more barracks. At the end of the day we received a pitiful portion of watery soup. Then I returned to my shelf in the barracks for a few hours of restless sleep before beginning the ordeal all over again the next morning.

The room where we slept was so crowded that if I left to use the latrine, I would lose my spot. When I returned I had to elbow my way back into my space. One night as I stumbled back into my bunk, I found my blanket was gone. I had stupidly left it there, and another prisoner, perhaps even colder and more desperate than I, had taken it. I was left to wrap my arms around myself, think of my mother’s embrace, and will myself to sleep.

Then the miraculous happened. Some of the men who had begun to watch out for me told me where the Schindler Jews had been assigned. I resolved to search until I found my father and David. This was not an easy decision. I had to be alert every second. If I were spotted, I could be killed; but my yearning to see my father and brother overpowered reason. Weak as I was, I stole away, determined to find my father and brother. Finally, totally exhausted, when I thought I would have to abandon my search, I opened one more door.

There they were.

I had never thought of my father and brother as beautiful, but right then I thought they were the most beautiful people I had ever seen.

When they recognized me, they were as excited as I was, hardly daring to believe that I had made it out of the ghetto. “We thought you had been deported,” David said. As he spoke, I saw pain and helplessness in my father’s eyes as he realized how weak and emaciated I had become. We talked in whispers for a few nervous minutes. As I left,
my father promised that he would ask Schindler to hire me. Meanwhile, he cautioned, I must stay where I had been assigned and avoid attracting any attention.

A week or so later, I had learned enough about the layout of the camp to guess where my mother was. Płaszów was frequently chaotic as construction continued and new prisoners arrived daily. One afternoon I took advantage of the pandemonium to sneak into the women’s section to find my mother. I was so small and thin, and my hair was so shaggy, I could pass for a girl; I knew I would be severely punished if I were discovered. Yet the danger was worth it if I could find my mother. I admit on that day I was just plain lucky. Without too many wrong turns, I found her barracks. She was lying on her wooden shelf. When she saw me, she couldn’t believe her eyes; to my disappointment, she seemed more startled than happy.

“How did you get here?” she asked. Before I could answer and tell her that I had found my father and brother, she told me, “You can’t stay. You have to go.” She could not
hold back the tears as she uttered the words that would send me away from her. At the very last moment she reached into the pile of rags on the shelf where she slept and pulled out a walnut-size piece of dry bread. It was all in the world my mother had to give me, the best she could do. I’m sure it was the only food she had. She embraced me for a few priceless seconds, pressed the bread into my hand, and pushed me out the door. It broke my heart to leave her, and it broke hers to send me away.

If I had known at that moment I would not see her again all that year, I probably wouldn’t have left her. Had I stayed, both of us, and perhaps others in her barracks, could have paid with our lives.

It was terrible to be alone without my parents, not knowing where Tsalig and Hershel were, or even if they were still alive. Especially at night I tried to remember their faces. I told myself they were thinking of me even as I was thinking of them; in our minds and hearts we were together. But that thought wasn’t enough to comfort or sustain me. All I could do was hold on and hope that
my father would somehow find a way for me to be with him. Meanwhile, I did as I was told. Some days I hauled lumber or stones; other times I pounded rocks into gravel or dug up cemetery markers that the Nazis then used to pave the roads. It was exhausting, hazardous work, and a single misstep could mean death.

One day, while carrying a large rock, I slipped on a broken headstone and badly gashed my leg. I had to go to the camp infirmary to have the cut bandaged. I learned later the commandant of Płaszów, SS Hauptsturmführer Amon Goeth, had entered the infirmary shortly after I had left and shot all the patients, just shot every single one of them for no reason except that he felt like it. Had I remained just a few minutes longer, I would have been executed with the others. When I heard what had happened, I promised myself no matter what, I would never go to the infirmary again.

Avoiding the infirmary didn’t mean escaping the net of cruelty Amon Goeth cast over the camp. When my work detail passed men in other groups, I would hear
the whispers being exchanged as they kept tally of the casualties by Goeth and his henchmen as if they were soccer scores.

“What’s the total today?” someone might ask. “Jews twelve, Nazis zero.” It was always a zero for the Nazi dead.

As the winter of 1943 began, Goeth’s wrath intensified. I had been ordered to shovel snow with a group of men. With no winter clothes, I was so frozen, I could hardly hold the shovel. Suddenly Hauptsturmführer Goeth showed up and on a whim demanded that the guards lash each of us twenty-five times with their savage leather whips. None of us could figure out the provocation, but that did not matter. As commandant, Goeth could do whatever he wanted, with or without a reason. He seemed to thrive on inflicting agony on the helpless. He watched the spectacle for a while, then decided that the whippings were going too slow, so he had guards set up long tables and lined us up in rows, four across. With three men twice my age and stature, I went up to receive my punishment. The whips had little ball bearings at the
end, intensifying the pain and damage. We were ordered to count the lashes as we were whipped. If we were overcome by the pain and missed a number, the guards started over at number one.

I leaned over the table and awaited the first lash. When it came, it felt like someone was cutting me open with a knife. “One,” I cried out as the whip cracked. My instinctive reaction was to cover my backside before the next stroke could hit, so the second crack of the whip fell across my hands. “Two,” I managed to get out. “Three. Four.” Although I was numb from the cold, the pain seared through me each time, like being branded by a poker.

“Twelve, thirteen, fourteen.” Would this torture never end? I knew I had to hold on and not falter or it would start all over again. I knew I couldn’t survive another round. After twenty-five blows I staggered away, delirious with pain. Somehow I managed to stumble back with the others to our work detail. My legs and buttocks throbbed. They were black and blue for months and sitting was torture.

Driven by pain and desolation, that evening I risked additional beatings or worse by sneaking over to my father’s barracks. I simply had to see him and tell him what had happened. Before I could get the words out, I began to cry. Trying to hold it together, not yet fifteen years old, I had finally cracked. I desperately needed his sympathy, but he offered none. He showed not a flicker of emotion when I arrived or when I finally blurted out my story. Instead, he remained silent, his face hardened and his jaw clenched. Perhaps what he felt was relief that no matter how bad it had been for me, I had survived Goeth’s brutality. Maybe his anger and sadness were so great that he feared breaking down if he tried to console me. Whatever he felt, he didn’t share it. Forlorn, feeling totally abandoned, I returned to my barracks. As I lay on my shelf, I listened as the men reviewed the day’s score: Jews 20, Nazis 0. Despondently, I picked a few lice off my sweater but gave up trying to get them all. I just didn’t care. The lice crawled through my hair and my clothes as I finally drifted off to sleep.

The horrific days came to follow a routine. We were stunned awake before dawn by the sound of crashing doors and shouted orders. We assembled in groups according to our barracks’ number and were counted and recounted while short-tempered, cruel guards harassed us. Then we were assigned to groups for the day’s labor. Sometimes we left camp to chop ice, shovel snow, or work on roads. We never got anything to eat until the workday ended. Then a big pot was brought out as we raced to retrieve our indispensable spoons and bowls. That one meal never varied: hot water with a little salt or pepper, and if we were lucky, bits of potato skin and slivers of other vegetables. The men ladling the soup were prisoners too, and sometimes one of them would take pity on me, stir the bottom of the pot, and put a real piece of potato into my bowl. That made the day exceptional. After the meal we lay on our shelves, trying to gather strength for the next day.