The Boy on the Wooden Box Read Free Page A

was mystified when the youngest son, a Zionist, decided to leave his home for distant Palestine. Why would he go so far away from his family and give up working and playing music with them? Now I realize his decision saved his life. His mother, his father, and his brothers all died in the Holocaust.
    Narewka lacked most of what we consider necessities today. Streets were made of cobblestones or were unpaved; most buildings were constructed of wood and were only one story high; people walked or traveled on horseback or by horse and wagon. I still remember when the marvel of electricity reached us in 1935. I was six years old. Every household had to decide whether or not to opt for electrical power. After a lot of discussion, my parents made the daring decision to bring the new invention into ourhome. A lone wire led to a socket installed in the middle of our ceiling. It seemed incredible that instead of a kerosene lamp, we now had a single glass bulb overhead by which we could read at night. All we had to do was pull the cord to turn it on and off. Whenever I thought my parents weren’t looking, I’d climb on a chair and pull the cord, just to see the light appear and disappear as if by magic. Amazing.
    In spite of the wonder of electricity, in most other ways life in Narewka remained as it had been for centuries. There was no indoor plumbing, and in the bitter winter the trip to the outhouse was one I learned to delay as long as possible. Our home had one large room that served as kitchen, dining room, and living room—all in one—and one bedroom. Privacy in the way we think of it today was entirely foreign to us. There was one bed, and we all shared it, my mother, brothers, sister, and I.
    We collected our water from a well in our yard, dropping a bucket until we heard a splash, then winding it up full of water. The challenge was not to lose too muchof the water as we lugged the bucket from the well to the house. It took several trips a day to meet our needs, so there was a lot of going back and forth to and from the well. I also gathered eggs, stacked wood chopped by Tsalig, dried dishes that Pesza washed, and ran errands for my mother. Most days I was the one who went to my grandfather’s barn to carry home a pitcher of milk from his cow.
    Our village at the edge of the Białowieża Forest was made up of farmers and blacksmiths, butchers and tailors, teachers and shopkeepers. We were agrarian, unsophisticated, industrious people, Jews and Christians alike, whose lives revolved around family, our religious calendars, and the seasons of sowing and reaping.
    Those of us who were Jewish spoke Yiddish at home, Polish in public, and Hebrew in religious school or at the synagogue. I also learned some German from my parents. It turned out that knowing German would prove more useful to us than we ever could have imagined.
    Because Polish law prohibited Jews from owning land,as had been the case for centuries for Jews in Europe, my maternal grandfather, Jacob Meyer, leased his farmland from the Eastern Orthodox Church. He endured long hours of physical labor to support his family. He tilled his fields. He dug potatoes out of the earth with a spade and cut down hay with a scythe. I felt grand riding atop his horse-drawn wagon when it was piled high with bundles of hay at the end of the harvest. After my father left for Kraków, my mother increasingly relied on her parents for help. My grandfather frequently came by our house with potatoes and beets and other produce from his garden to make sure his daughter and his grandchildren didn’t go hungry. Still, even with her parents’ help, my mother had her hands full, since by and large she was a single parent raising a houseful of children. Just keeping us fed and in clean clothes and making sure we had the supplies we needed for school was a huge job. She never had any time completely for herself.
    In Narewka everyone knew their neighbors and knew what they did for a living. Men