The Boy on the Wooden Box: Chapters 4–6

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.

His safecracking prowess had earned him Schindler's respect.

Over the next months, tens of thousands of frightened Jews departed for the outlying towns and villages from which many of them had so recently fled. Most went voluntarily, glad to be able to take a few of their possessions with them and relieved to escape the constant harangues and threats of the Nazis.

They told us the departing Jews were going to better lives away from the city, where they would be in less crowded conditions and not have to endure the relentless harassment from German soldiers patrolling the streets.

My father, ever ingenious, found a way to trade our apartment for one a gentile friend had inside the ghetto, hoping the swap might provide better accommodations than any the Nazis would arrange.

I looked up at the high walls and saw that, with their flair for the sadistic, the Nazis, in the last few days, had topped the walls with rounded stones that resembled headstones on graves.

Their implicit message was that we were moving into what would become our own cemetery.

The crowding, poor nutrition, and lack of hygiene made disease rampant; from typhus to scarlet fever, from malnutrition to psychosis, illness of some kind struck nearly every family.

But Nazi dogma grouped Jews as one, as the loathed enemy of the Aryans.

Retaining our humanity, cherishing our heritage, we fought the depravity of the Nazis with subtle forms of resistance.

Even with a special treat like that, my raging appetite didn't subside.

Escapees from earlier deportations had furtively returned to the ghetto with stories of trains filled with people entering a camp and leaving empty, even though the population of the camp never increased.

There was an overpowering sense of futility.

In the morning the ghetto reverberated with sounds of the Aktion, the roundup: gunshots, shouts in German, doors banging, and heavy boots on the stairs.

They had managed to survive on their own without their parents, but now we were all caught in limbo.