The Boy on the Wooden Box Read Online Free PDF Page A

to make us “the other.” He blamed Jews for Germany’s problems, past and present, from its defeat in the Great War to its economic depression.
    When Germany annexed Austria in March of 1938 and occupied the Sudentenland area of Czechoslovakia six months later, discrimination against Jews increased there as well. New restrictions made life for Jews in these areas more and more precarious.
    Before we had a chance to absorb all that news, we were hit by even worse; on Hitler’s orders, thousands of Polish Jews, perhaps as many as 17,000, had been expelled from Germany. The Nazi government had told them they were no longer welcome, that they were unworthy to live on German soil. The Polish government was intent on proving that it was as antisemitic as the Nazis and so refused to grant the refugees permission to reenter their homeland. Reports reached us that these Polish Jews were languishing on the border in a squalid no-man’s-land of temporary camps. Eventually some of them were able to bribe guards, cross the border, and make their way to Kraków and other towns.
    In front of me, my parents still downplayed the seriousness of events. “We’ve had pogroms before in the east,”my father said with seeming nonchalance. “Now there’s trouble in the west. But things will settle down. You’ll see.” I don’t know if that was what he really thought or if he was trying to convince himself and my mother as much as me. After all, where could we go? What could we do?
    Then came the worst news yet: In Germany and Austria, on the night of November 9–10, 1938, synagogues and Torah scrolls were burned and Jewish property destroyed. Jews were randomly beaten and close to one hundred were murdered. It seemed unbelievable to me that people would stand by while such awful things were happening. Nazi propaganda portrayed the events of that night as a spontaneous demonstration against Jews as retaliation for the killing of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jew named Herschel Grynszpan. We learned all too soon that had been just the excuse the Nazis needed. They used this event to launch a night of organized violence across the country. Later this night would be referred to as Kristallnacht , the Night of Broken Glass, because of the thousands of windows that had been shatteredin synagogues, in Jewish homes and businesses. In fact, much more than glass was shattered that night.
    It had been our fervent hope that somehow the Nazis would come to their senses and the persecution would stop. Even though my father tried to reassure me that we were safe and that the situation would calm down, for the first time, I was really scared.
    The possibility of war grew stronger. I heard talk of it in school, on the streets, everywhere I went. The news reported that Polish government officials had gone to Germany to meet with that country’s leadership to try to avert war. No matter how much my parents wanted to shield me, there was no way of protecting me from the growing fear that soon we would be at war with Germany.
    One time I went to the main square in Kraków to hear a speech by a famous Polish general, whose name I no longer remember. He stood proudly, extravagantly praising our nation’s army. He touted their bravery and vowed that if war came, Polish soldiers would not give the Germans who dared to invade so much “as a button from theiruniforms.” All of us wanted to believe the bravery of our soldiers could somehow defeat the mighty German military with all its planes and tanks. I’m sure my parents and many others had their doubts, but nobody wanted to appear unpatriotic or contribute to the alarm.
    During the summer of 1939, all of Kraków began to prepare for war in earnest. We boarded up the windows of our ground-floor apartment, and I helped my parents tape Xs across the windowpanes to prevent the glass from shattering. We tried to stock up on a few extra tins of food. Some families hurried to remodel their cellars into