The Boy on the Wooden Box (7 page)

Since some 15,000 people were jammed into an area meant to house 5,000, at most, the sanitation system was deplorably inadequate. The indoor plumbing we had once taken for granted now was an unattainable luxury. Lines were long for the few outhouses, and in the winter, by the time I finished, my feet were nearly frozen. The crowding, poor nutrition, and lack of hygiene made disease
rampant; from typhus to scarlet fever, from malnutrition to psychosis, illness of some kind struck nearly every family.

To Nazi eyes, we Jews were a single, detested group, the exact opposite of the blond, blue-eyed, pure “Aryans.” In reality we were not their opposites at all. Plenty of Jews had blue eyes and blond hair, and many Germans and Austrians, including Adolf Hitler, had dark eyes and hair. But Nazi dogma grouped Jews as one, as the loathed enemy of the Aryans. For them, being Jewish was not about what we believed, but about our so-called race. It made no sense to me, and I even wondered how Nazis could believe such contradictions themselves. Had they taken the time to really look at us, they would have seen human beings just like themselves: some with blue eyes, some with brown. They would have seen families just like their own: sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, craftsmen, and tailors, individuals from all walks of life.

The Nazis had forced us into impossibly crowded conditions designed to bring out the worst in people. Despite
everything against us, we remained determined to show respect and decency toward one another. Retaining our humanity, cherishing our heritage, we fought the depravity of the Nazis with subtle forms of resistance. Rabbis resisted by conducting services on Jewish holy days. Doctors and nurses resisted by fighting to save the lives of the ill and injured and by bringing new life into the world. Actors and musicians resisted by creating makeshift stages in hidden courtyards and performing plays and skits and holding concerts, affirming that beauty and culture could exist even in the midst of the horrible circumstances of the ghetto.

I remember chinning myself on the top of a fence to see one such comedy show filled with gallows humor. Even when I didn’t quite get the jokes, I laughed anyway because it was a way to show the Nazis they didn’t control me. It also made me feel better for just a few minutes. Jews resisted the bleak surroundings by sharing their hopes and dreams and stories with one another, as Mr. Luftig did with me.

Some people resisted by falling in love. Couples courted and married; babies were born. Romances blossomed despite the oppression that surrounded us. It happened to my brother Tsalig. He fell in love with Miriam, the daughter of a brush maker, who lived with her family in an apartment building behind ours. For my seventeen-year-old brother, romance was an entirely new experience and a wonderful diversion from the ghastliness of ghetto life. For me, his romance wasn’t quite such a positive, since it meant I now had to share my brother with someone else. As a result, I could get a little mean. “Her face is pretty, but I don’t like her legs,” I once griped to Tsalig—as if he had asked for my opinion. He could have gotten mad or defensive, but instead he just laughed and nudged me on the shoulder, saying, “One day you won’t be so critical when it comes to girls.” With that, he was off again to meet Miriam, to stroll hand in hand, maybe to make plans for a future life together.

During Tsalig’s absences, I found ways to keep myself busy. I went to a secret Hebrew school in a rabbi’s darkened
apartment. I made friends with other boys my age, including Yossel and Samuel, whose father, Mr. Bircz, was a shoemaker. They lived in the apartment below ours. My friends and I played cards and explored the maze of alleyways in the area. We staged spontaneous “shows” of our own in the courtyard behind our building, and I mimicked a comedy routine with a hat teetering on my head. I suspect my imitation was pretty poor, but my friends laughed all the same.

I even taught myself (sort of) to ride a bike. A man in our building had a bike parked outside his apartment. One day he asked me to clean it for him. In exchange, he promised to let me take it for a spin. Though I had never ridden a bike, I was intrigued. After I finished scrubbing and polishing the bike, I climbed on, stretched my legs to reach the pedals, and wobbled a few feet before falling over. I got back on, and when I finally thought I had gained my balance, I pushed off on what was my boldest attempt, steering around the corner and gaining speed. I felt almost airborne, flying down the street. For those few seconds I
was not a prisoner in a Nazi ghetto, trapped behind high walls, but a twelve-year-old boy like any other, relishing the mix of danger and excitement. Not even the inevitable end to my ride—when I crashed to the pavement, gashing my forehead—dampened my spirits or my enthusiasm.

Such diversions were precious few. I spent most of my time focused on the critical task of finding food. Every day I combed the sidewalks and alleys looking for a crust of bread or anything else edible in the attempt to combat my constant hunger. It’s hard to believe that my family survived even the first weeks in the ghetto, given how little food we had. My mother concocted a variety of soups, all with water as the main ingredient, and my father, whose work permit allowed him to leave the ghetto to work in Schindler’s factory several blocks away, tried to bring back a potato or piece of bread. I still remember standing by his side every evening as he emptied out his pockets, praying that buried in the lining might be some extra food we could share. Sometimes food was available on the black market, but one had to have something to exchange. The
Nazis provided limited amounts of bread but not much else.

Mr. Bircz, the shoemaker downstairs, had dealings outside the ghetto. One day he returned from a customer with
galareta
, a Polish dish of jellied chicken feet. Although they had little enough themselves, the family shared their meal with me. Even with a special treat like that, my raging appetite didn’t subside. I was hungry, really hungry, all the time. Sleep became my only relief, the only time I wasn’t thinking about eating, but frequently visions of food filled my dreams.

My family had already spent our safety net of gold coins, and my father’s savings had disappeared. All we had left to barter were the last of my father’s suits. When we were most desperate, Father once again asked his friend Wojek, who lived outside the ghetto, to sell one on the black market. As before, after taking a cut for himself, Wojek gave us the remaining coins.

Other Jews were better off than we were. Some had come to the ghetto with money or jewelry that they could
trade for food. A wealthy woman in the apartment above ours occasionally asked me to run errands for her. One day when I returned to her apartment, she took out an entire loaf of bread and cut off a thick slice for me as payment. I watched in astonishment as she liberally spread butter over the bread. It never occurred to me to eat this unexpected treasure all by myself. Instead, I took it straight to my mother. She scraped off the butter, cut the bread into thinner slices, and then spread the butter on each smaller piece. The whole family shared in this rare treat. That was a good day.

Without valuables of our own, my family’s only hope to fend off starvation was work, since work meant food, maybe soup at lunchtime and sometimes a small chunk of bread to take home. Each of us contributed however we could. In return for food, Tsalig continued to repair hot plates and other electrical items. Later on, he worked in Miriam’s father’s small brush-making business, which produced all kinds of brushes: bottle brushes, shoe brushes, and large brushes for scrubbing. He also did piecework
at home, earning a little money or food for each item he produced. Pesza worked at the electrical company outside the ghetto, and from time to time, she, too, brought back bread or a potato or two. My mother cleaned the offices of the Jewish Council and of the Nazis who had offices inside the ghetto.

One day my father summoned the courage to ask Schindler to hire my brother David, then fourteen, to work in his factory, and Schindler agreed. Every day Father and David would leave and return together, sometimes with morsels of food or a piece of coal. Now I stood between them each evening, hoping against hope that their pockets weren’t empty.

Thanks to Tsalig, who was always looking out for me, I, too, started working for the brush maker, stringing bristles through a board to make brushes for the Germans. Since I was only twelve, it might seem that I was young to be working full-time, but I didn’t think of myself as a child anymore, nor did anyone else. I needed to contribute to my family’s survival any way I could.

Did our family talk about the future or make contingency plans in case the situation got worse? In fact, we didn’t. We couldn’t think two minutes ahead when all our energy was concentrated on surviving to the next day. We stayed in the moment, determined to make it through the day unharmed. I kept up my single-minded obsession with finding food, to the point where I had no time or room in my mind for other thoughts. Our goal was staying alive long enough for the Germans to lose the war and leave defeated.

My father may have been terrified for our safety, but he kept his feelings hidden behind an impenetrable expression. He rarely spoke and some days barely acknowledged us. He would return from a long day of work, empty his pockets of whatever he had been able to get, and then collapse into bed. In contrast, Mr. Luftig remained outwardly cheerful. If we had a piece of coal burning in the oven, he would sit in front of it and warm his hands, with one of his pipes dangling from his mouth. That was his greatest pleasure, even though the pipe was empty. Sometimes my
mother would break the silence and state what we were all thinking: “How will we make it through the winter?” she asked repeatedly to no one in particular. “How will we make it?” I had absolutely no idea.

At Schindler’s factory, my father picked up rumors about the war from the gentile workers. He pieced together different bits of information from which he could track the movements of the German army and speculate on what the Allied forces in Europe, led by Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—no longer a partner with Germany—might be planning. Although we continued to hope the German army would soon be defeated, we couldn’t begin to know what would happen next. The scraps of information we received were frequently contradictory.

In May 1942, we had our first taste of the even worse suffering to come. The Nazis announced there would be a transport from the ghetto to the countryside and encouraged us to volunteer to leave the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions for the fresh air and open spaces.
Some 1,500 Jews volunteered to go, thinking that anything must be better than the squalid environment they were in. By June, however, the Nazis were past the nicety of asking for volunteers; instead, they demanded that all “nonessential” Jews, which meant mainly the elderly and those without jobs, vacate their apartments and leave on the transports. So far, my father’s work papers from Schindler’s factory had protected our family from deportation, but the Luftigs were not so fortunate. With little warning, they were ordered to pack their belongings and report to the main square of the ghetto. There was no time to help them prepare or even to exchange goodbyes.

As the deportation proceeded, I rushed downstairs to the shoemaker’s apartment to get a street-level view of what was happening. Scores of our friends and neighbors, including some of the boys with whom I had studied Hebrew and watched the makeshift comedy skits, silently walked down the main street toward the train station. I peeked over the windowsill and searched for the Luftigs.
Eventually they trudged by, suitcases in hand. I meant to wave, to send them an encouraging sign, but I froze in fear when I saw the German guards marching beside them, prodding them along with their rifles. Mr. Luftig stared straight ahead, showing no emotion. Did he see me out of the corner of his eye? I couldn’t tell. I could only hope. Gradually the Luftigs disappeared from sight, swallowed in a sea of thousands. I remained in my spot by the window until the last of the deportees passed by. Then, with a heavy heart, I climbed the steps to our apartment. “They’re gone,” I said sadly to my mother, telling her what she already knew.

“He left you this,” replied my mother, handing me an old-fashioned, glass-lined thermos bottle. Then I pulled back the blanket separating our side of the room from the Luftigs’ side, and I saw that he had left something else.

His exquisite pipes. A tremor ran down my spine. Mr. Luftig had determined that whatever his destination, he wouldn’t be needing his pipes. It was a disturbing omen.

A week later the Nazis had another train waiting and
began to round up more Jews. Evictions, they called them, not deportations. This time the deportees didn’t go quietly. Escapees from earlier deportations had furtively returned to the ghetto with stories of trains filled with people entering a camp and leaving empty, even though the population of the camp never increased. The more firsthand accounts we heard, the more we began to realize what was happening. It was terrifying. So the next time the Nazis started rounding up Jews, chaos erupted. Soldiers rampaged through the ghetto, demanding that people show the required identification and shoving anyone who couldn’t into the streets teeming with fellow unfortunates.

On June 8, German soldiers burst into our building and once again forced their way into our apartment. They shouted, “
Schnell! Schnell!
”—“Fast! Fast!”—as my father shakily presented his work permit. He had gotten a
Blauschein
, a “blue sheet” or Gestapo-issued permit, added to his identification card, which we hoped would again exempt all of us from deportation. Now that Tsalig
was seventeen, he needed a
Blauschein
of his own. Tragically he did not have one. If only we had had a few minutes’ warning, we would have found a way to hide Tsalig. But it was too late. I felt my blood turning to ice when I realized they were going to take my brother. In a split second the soldiers pounced on him. I wanted to scream,
No!
and leap to his rescue, but I knew it would be suicide, and I knew that I would be endangering all our lives. The soldiers pinned Tsalig’s arms behind his back and shoved him out the door. In the span of a minute, my beloved brother was gone.