84 pages • 2 hours read
Leon LeysonThe Boy On The Wooden Box
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapter 6
Chapter 6 Summary
Leon and his friend Yossel (one of the two sons of Mrs. Bircz) carry an elderly woman on a stretcher to the ghetto infirmary. In doing so, they stay out past the ghetto curfew, and Gestapo guards shoot at them. The shots miss the boys, and a terrified Leon spends the night hiding at a stranger’s apartment.
Schindler protects his Jewish workers from deportation by keeping them overnight at the factory. To hide from the Nazi roundup, Leon and his mother (along with Yossel and his brother Samuel) hide in the rafters of a storage shed.
As the population of the ghetto decreases due to the deportations, Leon and his mother are moved into another section of the ghetto, where they board in an attic with several other residents.
In March 1943, the remaining residents of the ghetto are deported to the Płaszów concentration camp. With deep feelings of loyalty, Leon decides to stay with his mother instead of hiding with Yossel and Samuel, whose mother has been deported. He hopes to reunite with the rest of his family at the camp. However, as he enters the gates to Płaszów, he is aware of entering “the innermost circle of hell” (112).
Chapter 6 Analysis
The second full chapter about life in the ghetto deepens the narrative’s depictions of the residents’ danger and suffering, but even amid this treacherous environment, Leon continued to show strong moral fiber when he and Yossel carried the sick woman to the infirmary at great risk to their own safety. This scene demonstrates that the mortal dangers of the Nazi occupation were not limited to the adult population, for children were equally at risk and learned to engage in Passive Resistance in the Face of Oppression.
The impact of Schindler’s activities at Emalia comes into greater prominence in this section via the relative safety afforded to Moshe and thanks to their jobs. It was this form of indirect resistance and protection that Schindler’s business practices provided to his oppressed Jewish workforce during the war years. However, while Moshe and Pesza were somewhat shielded, the rest of the family remained vulnerable to the Nazi roundups and had to go into hiding. The suspenseful scene of Chanah, Leon, Yossel, and Samuel hiding in the rafters from the SS men emphasizes the very real danger that the group could have been discovered and killed.
Significantly, Chanah also displayed a measure of indirect defiance when she decided to destroy the family’s furniture before vacating their apartment, ensuring that the family left behind nothing that the Nazis would find worth looting. Although this was a symbolic gesture, her actions evoke the other ways in which Jews quietly resisted the Nazis in the ghetto. When Leon and his fellow ghetto residents reemerged into the main part of Kraków, he was struck by the fact that life for others had continued as usual, and his shock draws attention to the indifference of the broader population to the plight of European Jews, indicating that this deadly indifference allowed an ever-increasing variety of atrocities to rage unchecked.
