The Boy on the Wooden Box by Leon Leyson Read Free Book Online

times when I disobeyed the rules and thumbed my nose atthe 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 meantdoing 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 wassomething 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.

OSKAR SCHINDLER HAS BEEN CALLED many names: scoundrel, womanizer, war profiteer, drunk. When Schindler gave my father a job, I didn’t know any of those names, and I wouldn’t have cared if I had. Kraków was filled with Germans who wanted to make a profit from the war. Schindler’s name meant something to me only because he had hired my father.
    That fortunate encounter over the safe resulted in my father becoming one of the first Jewish workers at the company Schindler initially leased and then, in November1939, took over from a bankrupt Jewish businessman named Abraham Bankier. In fact, of the two hundred fifty workers Schindler hired in 1940, only seven were Jews; the rest were Polish gentiles. Schindler renamed the company Deutsche Emalwarenfabrik, German Enamel Works, a name designed to appeal to German army contractors. He called it Emalia for short. Armies need a lot more than weapons and bullets to fight a war. As a clever businessman, Schindler seized the opportunity and began producing enamelware pots and pans for the Germans, a line of production guaranteed to generate a large ongoing profit, especially since his labor costs were minimal. He could exploit Polish workers at low wages and Jews for none at all.
    Although my father didn’t bring home any money, he was able to bring home some pieces of bread or coal