The Boy on the Wooden Box Read Online Free PDF

bomb shelters. I began to feel more nervous excitement than fear during all the preparations and the making of emergency plans. Unlike my parents, I had no concept of what war was actually like.
    In this tumultuous time I grew ever closer to my brother Tsalig. A self-taught electrician, Tsalig was in high demand to install electricity in our neighbors’ newly reconfigured cellars. I think he knew I needed the comfort of his presence because he sometimes let me go along with him and carry his tools. More and more, I tried to model myselfafter him, and I was pleased whenever anyone looked at the two of us and commented on how much we looked and even walked alike. When we lined up our shoes at bedtime, I could see from the way they curled up at the toes that we really did walk the same way.
    Some Jews prepared for war by leaving Kraków. They reasoned that eastern Poland, closer to the Soviets, would be safer than the west, with its proximity to Germany. One Jewish family in our building took a barge up the Vistula River to Warsaw, more than one hundred fifty miles to the northeast. Before they left, the man of the family entrusted my father with the key to their apartment, never doubting that he and his family would soon return to reclaim it. We never saw them again.
    As the days grew increasingly tense, my mother clearly missed more and more her village and the support of her extended family. After all, in order to join her husband, she had left her parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws in Narewka. She had met and made friends with a few other women married to men who worked in the same factoryas my father, but having acquaintances was not the same as having her family. I loved city life; but for my mother , the adjustment was very difficult. She just wanted to go home. However, without my father’s consent and blessing, she would never consider leaving. And my father couldn’t imagine abandoning the life in Kraków he had worked so hard to construct for himself and his family.
    Then, in the predawn hours of September 1, 1939, an air-raid siren jolted me out of sleep. I ran from the bed to the other room and found my parents already there, listening intently to the radio. In somber tones a newscaster reported the sketchy details that were available. German tanks had crossed the border into Poland; the Luftwaffe, the German air force, had attacked a Polish border town, and the invasion of Poland by the Germans had begun.
    As the air-raid sirens blared, my parents, Tsalig, Pesza, David, and I hurried single file down the stairs to the cellar, where we joined our neighbors. Within minutes, we heard planes flying overhead. We expected the sounds of exploding bombs to follow, but strangely, they didn’t. When theall-clear signal began to wail, we went back upstairs to our apartment. I peeked out the window and heaved a sigh of relief when there were no German soldiers in sight. Only an eerie quiet filled the streets. When we learned two days later that France and England had declared war against Germany, I felt hopeful. Surely they would quickly come to our defense, I thought. But in the days that followed, no help came.
    The Polish army, no matter its bravery, proved unable to stop the flood of German soldiers who had crossed into Poland and quickly moved east. There was a complete collapse, ending the life we had known in Kraków.
    In the first days after the outbreak of war, many adult males—both Jews and non-Jews—fled east, away from the front. Based on their experiences in the Great War, people assumed women and children would be safe, but able-bodied men would be conscripted into the German army as forced laborers. Since my father and Hershel were the most likely ones to be taken, they decided to join the exodus and head back to Narewka. Because the journeywould be perilous as the Germans advanced and because Tsalig, David, and I were still young enough, or looked young enough, to be spared, we were to stay in