The Boy on the Wooden Box (5 page)

My tenth birthday, on September 15, 1939, passed unnoticed amid the confusion and uncertainty of those first weeks of German occupation. Fortunately, Kraków was spared the destructive bombardments that targeted Warsaw and other cities; even without the threat of bombs, there was terror on the streets. The German soldiers acted with impunity. One could never predict what they would do next. They looted Jewish businesses. They evicted Jews from their apartments and moved in, confiscating their belongings. Orthodox Jewish men were special targets. Soldiers would grab them off the street, beat them, and cut off their beards and side curls, known as
payot
, just for sport, or what they considered sport. There were some gentile Poles who also saw new opportunities. One morning several Poles stormed our building to raid the
apartment upstairs, where the Jewish family that fled to Warsaw had lived. They banged on our apartment door. When my father refused to give them the key that had been entrusted to him, they simply raced up the stairs, broke in, and ransacked the place anyway.

Not long after that, Nazi entrepreneurs arrived on the scene in the hope of making their fortune off the misery of Jewish factory owners who were no longer permitted to own a business. The glass factory where my father worked was one of those targets. The Nazi businessman who took over the company immediately fired all the Jewish workers, all except my father. He was spared because he spoke German. The new owner made my father the official liaison, akin to a translator, between himself and the Christian Poles still allowed to work. For the first time in months, I saw my father look a bit more confident. He insisted that the war wouldn’t last long and since he had a job, we would be safe. By next year, maybe by the end of this year, he predicted, it would all be over. Just as the Germans had left at the end of the Great War,
so they would leave again. I suspect that there were Jewish parents all across Kraków who delivered similar messages to their children, not only to comfort them but also to reassure themselves. My father was making the same mistake so many others were, believing that the Germans with whom he was now dealing were no different from the ones he had known before. He had no idea, nor could he have had, of the limitless inhumanity and evil of this new enemy.

One evening, without warning, two members of the Gestapo—the German secret police—burst through the front door of our apartment. The Poles who had pillaged our neighbors’ apartment had tipped them off, telling them that we were Jews and that my father had refused to hand over the key. Reporting him was their chance for revenge. In front of us, these thugs, who could not have been more than eighteen years old, taunted my father, shouting at him to tell them where he had hid the key. They smashed dishes and pushed over furniture. They shoved my father up against the wall and demanded to
know where we kept our money and jewels. I guess they really didn’t take a close look at our modest apartment. They just followed their racist ideology that all Jews hoarded wealth. Despite their brutality, my father thought he could reason with them, that by using calm logic, he could convince them that we had no money or jewels.

“Look around,” he said to them. “Do we seem rich?”

When he realized that they weren’t interested in his arguments, he did something even worse. He said he would report them to their supervisors, the Nazi officials he knew at the factory. His threats only inflamed them. They beat him with their bare fists, slammed him to the floor, and choked him. I was sickened by their ruthlessness. I wanted to run away so I didn’t have to watch, but I felt like my feet were rooted in concrete. I saw the shock and shame in my father’s eyes as he lay helpless in front of his wife and children. The proud, ambitious man who had brought his family to Kraków for a better life was powerless to stop the Nazi brutes who dared break into his home. Suddenly, before I realized what was happening,
these bullies dragged my father out of the apartment, down the stairs, and into the night.

Those were the worst moments of my life.

For years after, those scenes of horror replayed in my mind. In a way, that terrible episode became not only the precursor but also the symbol for all the horrible viciousness that would follow. Until that instant when I saw my father beaten and bloody, I had somehow felt I was safe. I know how irrational that must seem, given what I saw happening around me; but until that evening I had thought I had a special immunity, that somehow the violence wouldn’t touch me. Until that instant, when I saw my father brutalized before my eyes, I knew different. The realization convinced me I couldn’t be passive; I couldn’t simply wait for the Germans to be defeated.

I had to act.

I had to find my father.

In the days that followed, my brother David and I searched all over Kraków, trying to find where the Gestapo had taken him. We went to every police station
and government building, any place that had the Nazi flag draped outside. Because both my brother and I could speak German and because the full villainy of the Germans was not yet evident, we brazenly questioned every German we thought might know something. Only now do I realize what we did was quite simply crazy. With every German we approached, we put our lives in danger. Despite all our efforts, we came up empty. Nobody admitted to knowing that our father had been arrested, let alone where he was being held. It was the worst possible nightmare. Pesza went with David and me to a lawyer, whom we begged for help. He sent us home with the promise that he would find our father although he really had no idea where to begin.

With each dead end, I felt an escalating fear. I did my best to hide it and appear strong for my mother, but sometimes she shook me awake at night because I’d had another nightmare, reliving those awful moments when my father was beaten before my eyes. I tried to keep from thinking the obvious: If the Nazis could beat him in front of all of us, what might they do to him when he was out of
our sight? When I thought of him suffering, I even began to feel a little guilty for hoping that he was still alive. I didn’t want him to have to endure more beatings or to be tortured. Was there really any chance that he would ever return?

As days turned into weeks and the likelihood of finding Father deteriorated, our situation became increasingly desperate. My father had kept a savings account in a Kraków bank, but those funds had disappeared when all Jewish bank accounts became the property of the Nazis. Now what little money we had was nearly gone. We did have a meager emergency reserve, a secret stash of ten gold coins my grandmother had given my mother before we left Narewka. One by one, my mother traded the coins for food. All too soon the coins were gone, and with them, our only safety net.

My mother was frantic, beside herself with fear and anxiety. In a city occupied by the enemy, away from the protection of family in Narewka, she nearly broke down. Nights were especially difficult, for they were the few
hours when she couldn’t busy herself feeding or caring for us. She tossed restlessly in the bed. I could feel her body shudder as she cried out, “What will we do? How will we live?” I felt determined to help her somehow, to relieve her anguish and to show her she could rely on me; but, as her youngest child, I doubt my reassurances gave her much confidence. She was on her own, weighted down with the staggering burden of sole responsibility for keeping her children and herself alive.

At the beginning of December 1939, the Nazis decreed Jews could no longer attend school. When I first heard of this new restriction, I felt a brief sense of freedom. What ten-year-old wouldn’t enjoy a few days off from school? But the feeling didn’t last long. I quickly realized the vast difference between choosing not to go to school for a day or two and being forbidden to ever attend. It was just one more way the Nazis sought to take everything of value away from us.

I now joined David and Pesza in looking for jobs. It wasn’t easy, since there were lots of other Jewish kids
doing exactly the same thing. David managed to find work as a plumber’s helper, carrying his tools and assisting him in a number of ways. My sister worked cleaning houses. I started hanging out at a soft drink company, volunteering to put labels on the bottles. At the end of the day I received a single bottle of soda as payment. I took it home for all of us to share.

One afternoon, as I was returning from work, I spotted one of the Gestapo who had beaten my father. I was sure of it! I don’t know what possessed me, but I chased after him and begged him to tell me where he had taken my father. The intimidating figure stared down at me with disdain, as if I were less than a piece of lint on his coat. Had I known better, I would have been scared for my life. But I didn’t, and maybe my boldness impressed him, because he told me my father was at St. Michael’s prison. I raced to find David, and together we sprinted into the central city to the forbidding building. Sure enough, the authorities confirmed that our father was there. Though we weren’t permitted to see him, just knowing he was
alive gave us a renewed sense of purpose. Somehow he had held on, and so could we. David and I spent most of our days going to the prison, taking with us packages of food carefully prepared and wrapped by my mother. As I think about it now, I realize the Gestapo officer could have lied to me and I would not have known, but for some reason he didn’t.

Several weeks later, for no apparent reason, my father was released from prison. The moment he came through our door was one of overwhelming relief and joy. At the same time, it brought an unexpected sadness. It was easy to see that what he had gone through had changed him. It wasn’t just that he was weak and gaunt; he was changed in a more fundamental way. The Nazis had not only stripped him of his strength—although he would find a great reserve of it in the years ahead—but also of the confidence and self-esteem that had put a spring in his step. Now he spoke little and walked with downcast eyes. He had lost his job at the glass factory, and he had lost something even more precious: his dignity as a human being. It shook me
to the core to see my father defeated. If he couldn’t stand up to the Nazis, how could I?

As 1939 drew to an end, I realized that my father’s prediction had been wrong. Our situation seemed dire in every way. All signs pointed to the war going on for a long time. The Nazis were not content with what they had already inflicted on us Jews; each day brought a new humiliation. If a German soldier approached, Jews had to get off the sidewalk until he passed by. Beginning in late November, Jews who were twelve years and older were required to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David that we had to purchase from the Jewish Council, the governing body the Nazis had appointed to deal with all Jewish matters. To be caught without the armband meant arrest and most likely torture and death.

Since I was not yet twelve, I didn’t wear the armband identification; when I was old enough to wear it, I made up my mind not to. Even though my confidence had been shaken by what I had seen and experienced, there were times when I disobeyed the rules and thumbed my nose at
the Nazis. In a way, I used their own stereotypes against them, since there was nothing about me that made it obvious I was a Jew. With my thick, dark hair and blue eyes, I looked like a lot of other Polish boys. Now and then, I would sit on a park bench just to prove I could do what I wanted, resisting the Nazis in my own small way. Of course, I couldn’t do that when anyone who knew me was around. The friends with whom I used to play now looked the other way when I was near. I don’t know if they would have betrayed me, but most likely they would have, in an attempt to obliterate their memory of how they had once been friends with a Jew. I watched them walk to school in the mornings as if nothing had changed, when for me, everything had. I was no longer the happy-go-lucky, adventurous boy who had gleefully looked forward to snatching a free ride on a streetcar. Somehow I had become an obstruction to Germany’s goal of world supremacy.

My father found his own way to defy the Nazis and to help us survive at the same time, even though it meant
doing something illegal. He worked on the sly, off the books, so to speak, for the glass company on Lipowa Street. One day he was sent across the street, to Lipowa Street 4, to the enamelware factory where he sometimes had repaired tools and equipment before the war. The new owner, a Nazi, needed a safe opened. My father asked no questions. He simply pulled out the correct tools and quickly cracked open the safe. It turned out to be the best thing he ever did, since, quite unexpectedly, the Nazi offered him a job.

I have often wondered what my father thought at that moment. Did he feel relief or only a different anxiety about what this Nazi would ask him to do next? He knew that whatever wages he earned would never reach his hand, but would go straight to the Nazi. In other words, accepting the offer of a job meant working for free, but it also meant the chance of protection for himself and his family. There might be someone to stand between him and the next Nazis to come to his door. It was worth a try. Refusing really wasn’t an option. Maybe he sensed that there was
something decent about this particular Nazi. Maybe, beaten down as he already was and ready to grab on to the thinnest lifeline of hope, he just thought,
Do as you’re told. Don’t make trouble. Show your value. Survive.

Whatever his motivation, my father accepted the job on the spot. In doing so, he made a decision that had unimaginable consequences.

The Nazi businessman whose safe he cracked, who had just hired him, was Oskar Schindler.