The Boy on the Wooden Box von Leon Leyson

“Much like The Boy In the Striped Pajamas or The Book Thief,” this remarkable memoir from Leon Leyson, one of the youngest children to survive the Holocaust on Oskar Schindler’s list, “brings to readers a story of bravery and the fight for a chance to live” (VOYA).

This, the only memoir published by a former Schindler’s list child, perfectly captures the innocence of a small boy who goes through the unthinkable. Leon Leyson (born Leib Lezjon) was only ten years old when the Nazis invaded Poland and his family was forced to relocate to the Krakow ghetto. With incredible luck, perseverance, and grit, Leyson was able to survive the sadism of the Nazis, including that of the demonic Amon Goeth, commandant of Plaszow, the concentration camp outside Krakow.

Ultimately, it was the generosity and cunning of one man, Oskar Schindler, who saved Leon Leyson’s life, and the lives of his mother, his father, and two of his four siblings, by adding their names to his list of workers in his factory—a list that became world renowned: Schindler’s list.

Told with an abundance of dignity and a remarkable lack of rancor and venom, The Boy on the Wooden Box is a legacy of hope, a memoir unlike anything you’ve ever read.* “Leyson, who died in January at age 83, was No. 289 on Schindler’s list and its youngest member. He was just 13

when Leyson’s father convinced Oskar Schindler to let “Little Leyson” (as Schindler knew him) and other family

members find refuge in the Emalia factory; Leyson was so small he had to stand on a box to work the machinery.

Leyson and his coauthors give this wrenching memoir some literary styling, but the book is at its most powerful when

Leyson relays the events in a straightforward manner, as if in a deposition, from the shock of seeing his once-proud

father shamed by anti-Semitism to the deprivation that defined his youth. Schindler remains a kindly but enigmatic

figure in Leyson’s retelling, occasionally doting but usually distant. Leyson makes it clear that being “Schindler Jews”

offered a thread of hope, but it never shielded them from the chaos and evil that surrounded them. Readers will close

the book feeling that they have made a genuinely personal connection to this remarkable man.”
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