The Boy on the Wooden Box (13 page)

Disoriented and uncertain, we continued to drift around the Brünnlitz camp for two days. I couldn’t absorb the fact that we were now liberated, even as our enemies, the vanquished German soldiers, streamed past us by the hundreds. I stood and watched them, the once confident troops now dejected prisoners of the Soviets.
Hour after hour, they trudged by, their heads down, their expressions sullen. Some of the Jewish workers contemplated revenge. A few grabbed the soldiers’ boots and tossed their own wooden clogs at them in exchange. I didn’t join in. There was no way to “even the score” with the Nazis, no matter what I did. All I wanted was to remember those hours forever, remember the sight of the once proud soldiers straggling past us in abject defeat.

Eventually the Czech authorities provided free transport by trains for those of us who decided to return to Poland. My mother longed to go all the way to Narewka to find Hershel and her family, but my father said it was still too dangerous to travel that far east. Instead, he decided that the five of us would return to Kraków. Of course, we all nurtured the secret hope that somehow Tsalig had escaped and would be there waiting for us.

This time the cattle cars had bunks and the sliding doors remained open. We could breathe in the smells of springtime and watch the passing countryside. From my spot, I surveyed the scenery and noticed few signs of the war
that had decimated our lives. Trees sprouted new leaves; wildflowers were blooming. The scars from the war, which I felt so deeply, weren’t visible in the passing landscape. It was almost as if these terrible years of suffering had never happened, but I only had to look at the worn and weary faces of my parents to know otherwise.

As the train rumbled eastward, I allowed myself to do something I hadn’t done in years: to think about the future. For the past six years, thinking about the future had meant only thinking about how to survive the next hour, how to find the next scrap of food, how to escape the next brush with death. Now the future meant much more. I might be able to return to school. I might be able to have a home, adequate food, security. One day I might feel safe again.

The train stopped frequently to let passengers off at points near where they had come from. Each time, passengers climbed down and quickly left, without looking back or saying good-bye. There was no reason to prolong the ordeal a moment longer. I watched my former coworkers
scatter across Poland, one by one, family by family. All of us prayed that our suffering was over, that we could go back to our lives, to the families from whom we had been separated for so long.

Sadly, in Kraków, I soon realized the suffering wasn’t over. My parents, David, Pesza, and I arrived still wearing our striped prison uniforms. We clutched our only possessions—the bolts of cloth and bottles of vodka that Schindler had secured for us—and walked tentatively through the city toward our old neighborhood. We were greeted by curious stares and an indifference that completely unsettled me. We found Wojek, the kind gentile who had sold my father’s suits, and we connected with a former neighbor on Przemyslowa Street. He let us stay in his apartment a few nights and decided to throw a little party for my father. Over shots of vodka from one of our precious bottles, he confessed he was surprised that we had survived.

It became clear that many others in the city shared his surprise. To some, the Jews’ unexpected return was not
welcome. They wondered what we would expect from them. They had suffered their own hardships and losses during the war and weren’t interested in ours. Some were antisemitic and had been pleased to see us out of what they considered to be their country, despite the fact that Jews had lived there for over one thousand years. Now we were back, causing them anxiety though we were simply trying to adjust to freedom and begin rebuilding our lives.

My mother found a tailor who sewed a pair of pants for me from my bolt of cloth—my first new trousers in nearly six years. His payment was the fabric remaining on the bolt. My father was able to get his old job back at the glass factory. We urgently needed a place of our own. We found lodging in a student dormitory that had become a receiving center for refugees. That’s what we were now, I realized. Refugees. Outsiders, ironically, in a country where Jews had a long history. At the end of the war, of Kraków’s prewar Jewish population of about 60,000, only a few thousand remained.

The dormitory housed other returning homeless as well.
As in the ghetto, we divided the room into sections, using ropes with blankets draped over them. Soon there were more and more people looking for space as Jews returned to the city to search for their families and try to reclaim their homes and their prewar lives. Many of them came from Soviet-occupied areas in the east. One day my mother found a young woman and her mother sleeping in the hallway. My mother insisted that they share our space. Gradually each of the four corners filled with a different family.

That summer the backlash in Kraków against returning Jews intensified. A Jewish woman was falsely accused of kidnapping a gentile boy. Rumors circulated that emaciated Jews returning from the camps were using gentile children’s blood for transfusions, a revival of the ancient accusation known as blood libel. The accusation, in the past and the present, was false and ridiculous, but it nonetheless put the city on edge. A mob gathered at one of the remaining synagogues, shouting slurs, and then came to our building to throw rocks at the windows. After an hour
or so, the hoodlums left, but the violence revived old fears; once again I longed to be invisible. My father went to work every day, while the rest of us spent most of our time inside our makeshift home, afraid to venture out. Was this to be our future? Had we survived the war, the ghetto and camps, only to continue to live in dread?

On August 11, 1945, rioting broke out when a gentile boy claimed that Jews were trying to kill him. Hooligans attacked our building, again pelting the windows with rocks, pulling people from the first floor to beat them with their bare hands. We scrambled from our room to the safety of a higher floor. Elsewhere in the city, rioters looted a synagogue and burned the Torah scrolls. There were reports that Jews beaten in the streets had been hospitalized only to be beaten again. At the factory my father had been warned not to leave after work; the streets were too dangerous, so he stayed overnight, in relative safety. My mother, my siblings, and I faced a long night on our own.

The next day, after my father returned from the factory,
we told him what had happened the night before. He remained silent.

“We can’t stay here,” David said to my father.

“If we could get back to Narewka . . . ,” my mother offered. She often said this after the war. She had never felt at home in the city and certainly had no reason to alter that feeling now, but the real reason for her longing to return to Narewka was the thread of hope that at least some of our family, and especially my oldest brother, Hershel, had survived.

“We can’t go back yet,” responded my father. “Maybe never.”

My father related his devastating news. My mother listened horror-struck as he told us what he had learned from his factory contacts originally from Narewka. Some had managed to go back to look for family. What they reported was terrifying. Following the invading German army, mobile killing squads of the SS, called Einsatzgruppen, had swept through the villages of eastern Poland with the sole purpose of murdering Jews. They reached Narewka
in August 1941. There they took all the Jewish men in the village, some five hundred, to a meadow near the forest, machine-gunned them down, and buried them in a mass grave. The SS took the women and children to a nearby barn, where they were held for a day, and then they, too, were executed. In one blow, all of our extended family in Narewka, some one hundred relatives—my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—had been murdered. It was beyond belief. As she thought of her parents, my mother could only whisper, “I hope they died before the Einsatzgruppen arrived.”

All at once the full impact of what we had been told hit us.

We had never heard from Hershel in those six long years we had been separated. We had assumed he had made it to Narewka, which in 1939 was under Soviet control and had seemed a safer place for him than Kraków. Now we learned that Hershel had indeed made it back to Narewka, only to be taken prisoner and murdered by the SS assassins on that terrible day in August. My mother collapsed as the rest of us stood, stunned by the atrocity.

Many years later I went back to Narewka. A gentile Pole I met there spoke of how one young Jew had tried to run, but, as he said, “one of ours”—in other words, a non-Jew—spotted him and reported him to the SS, who shot him immediately. As I think about my impetuous brother, I can imagine him being that young man who made a run for the forest, doing everything he possibly could to try to survive.

As the weeks passed, life did not improve. There were constant reports of recurring hostility toward Jews. Jobs were scarce and so was food. The future for us in Kraków looked bleak.

Early in 1946, David and Pesza devised a plan to go back to Czechoslovakia to see if they could settle there. I went with them across the border. After a few days, however, my mother sent word through a friend that she needed at least one of her children to be with her. As the youngest, still only sixteen, I was the obvious choice. I said good-bye to David, and Pesza took me back to Kraków. She then returned to Czechoslovakia and David. It hurt to say good-bye to my brother and sister. Amazingly, we
had managed to stay together during the last years of the war. Now they were adults and eager to begin anew. My parents never would have tried to dissuade them.

A few months later my parents enlisted the help of a Zionist organization—one of the groups whose goal was to establish a Jewish national state. We hoped that they could smuggle us out of Poland. We did not consider going to British-controlled Palestine as the life there would be too arduous for my parents. After several weeks of anxiously waiting, our window of opportunity came. We paid a guard a small bribe and slipped across the border. We traveled by train through Czechoslovakia, arriving finally in Salzburg, Austria. There a United Nations relief organization assigned us to a displaced persons camp in Wetzlar, Germany, in the American occupation zone. On the one hand, it seemed strange to be in Germany, of all places; on the other, it felt good to be opening a new chapter in our lives.

Homeless, stateless, in yet another camp, we could have felt defeated, but Wetzlar was very different from the
camps during the war. We had three meals a day, reliable medical care, and the protection of the US military. Pretty good. Most importantly, we could come and go as we pleased. I took every opportunity to go into town and strike up a conversation with anyone willing to talk with me. I befriended other teenagers in the camp, including a pretty Hungarian girl my age. I learned to speak fluent Hungarian just so I could talk with her. In fact, some Hungarians were so convinced that I was Hungarian that they spoke Polish when they didn’t want me to understand what they were saying. Little did they know that Polish was my native language.

To my mother’s delight, I put on weight, began to fill out my skeletal frame, and grew several inches. My hair came back dark and thick. I had new clothes, made by tailors in the camp who ripped apart military uniforms at the seams and refashioned them into civilian clothes. Someone even gave me a hat, a brown fedora. It became my trademark. I wore it everywhere, emulating in my own way my father’s prewar flair for style.

Occasionally my new friends and I would argue about who had had it worse during the war. Some had been in labor camps, some in concentration camps, some even in the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Others had been in hiding in many different circumstances. We couldn’t resist the urge to swap stories and exchange information, even though such conversations sometimes led to jealousy and anger. In a strange way we seemed to be vying for the worst experience. We all had been through our private hells, and we were still processing what we had experienced. None of us knew what to do with the enormous burden of our memories. Sometimes the pain of our grief would break through the surface and threaten the fragile friendships we were nurturing.

I never felt like the camp was home, but I began to get used to the life there as we waited to see which country might allow us to immigrate. There were lots of people like us, looking for a place that would take them in.

The Germans had ended my schooling shortly after I turned ten. My parents were concerned about my lack of
education and what that might mean for my future. My father began looking for someone to tutor me, to help me make up at least part of what I had lost. In the nearby town he found a former German engineer who was now unemployed and had five children to feed. Three times a week for two years, I went to Dr. Neu’s house to be tutored in mathematics and drafting. We began with basic arithmetic and worked our way up to the complexities of trigonometry.

Over time I came to look forward to my lessons with Dr. Neu. After my experiences with Oskar Schindler, I felt I could tell the difference between those Germans who had been true Nazis and those who had retained some humanity, even if they had joined the Nazi Party. I found that the true believers would look down at their shoes or wind their watches when someone mentioned the war. When someone spoke of what the Jews had gone through, their stock response was “We didn’t know.” Dr. Neu wasn’t like that. He asked me about my experiences and genuinely listened to what I told him. I was reminded of how Oskar
Schindler had asked me questions and had waited for my answers. Dr. Neu didn’t try to whitewash what had happened. One time, when I was telling him a story, his wife overheard us. “We didn’t know,” she muttered. He gave her a piercing look and said, “Don’t say that.” After the awkward moment passed, he urged me to continue with my story.

Through Jewish organizations, my parents connected with our few relatives in the United States. My mother’s sister, Shaina, and brother Morris, who had left Narewka in the early 1900s, now lived in Los Angeles. (Uncle Karl had died shortly after arriving in the United States.) Based on the reports they heard, they had come to believe that all their family in Poland had been murdered. They were ecstatic to learn the three of us were in a displaced persons camp. Our American relatives wrote letters and sent packages to us, packages filled with food donated by other friends from Narewka now living in the United States. Since we didn’t have any money to pay Dr. Neu for my tutoring, we gave him items from our CARE packages;
coffee and cigarettes, and food items from the DP camp my family would not eat, like canned ham.