The Boy on the Wooden Box: Chapter 9–Epilogue

I burrowed my way into the middle of the group to the warmest spot in the midst of the bodies. If I stood still for too long, I found myself on the periphery again.

This time the camp was to produce munitions for the war.

Once at Brünnlitz, we learned the women had not arrived from Kraków.
Their train had been diverted to Auschwitz.

It's good that I didn't know until later that in April 1945, the SS was ordered to murder all the Jewish workers at the factory, but Schindler managed to thwart the plan and get the SS officer in charge transferred out of the area before he could carry out the instructions.

He said we were free and told us to tear the numbers and triangles off our uniforms. As I think back to that moment, it seems like we ripped them off in unison, an affirmation of our solidarity and victory.

Miraculously, Oskar Schindler, this complex man of many contradictions — Nazi opportunist, schemer, courageous maverick, rescuer, hero — had saved nearly 1,200 Jews from almost certain death.

I stood and watched them, the once confident troops now dejected prisoners of the Soviets.

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.

That summer the backlash in Kraków against returning Jews intensified.

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.

We did not consider going to British-controlled Palestine as the life there would be too arduous for my parents.

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.

For Americans, a word like "camp" evoked happy summer memories that were nothing like what I had experienced in Płaszów and Gross-Rosen.

It was serendipitous when writer Thomas Keneally walked into the luggage store that the Pages owned in Beverly Hills and became fascinated by the story Mr. Page told him.

During the years of unprecedented inhumanity, Schindler saw value in the very people the Nazis labeled as less than human and sought to eradicate.