The Boy On The Wooden Box
The Boy On The Wooden Box
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Leon Leyson on The Boy On The Wooden Box
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Fifty years of silence, then SpielbergFor roughly half a century after liberation, Leyson returned to ordinary American life: he studied, raised a family in Fullerton, California, and spent thirty-nine years teaching industrial arts at Huntington Park High School. His daughter Stacy later explained to the Los Angeles Times why the silence held so long.
He didn’t think anybody was interested. He didn’t have public speaking experience. He didn’t think he was going to be any good.
Silence was also a considered choice about how to live. Having survived, Leyson wanted his children shaped by what came after the war, not by what came during it.
The truth is, I did not live my life in the shadow of the Holocaust. I did not give my children a legacy of fear. I gave them a legacy of freedom.
The 1993 Spielberg film broke the silence. A Los Angeles Times reporter sought Leyson out after the premiere, and he saw the film for the first time at an invitational screening with other Schindler Jews. What struck him was not only recognition but a dislocation: the children fleeing the Sonderkommando, the Nazi units that liquidated the Kraków ghetto, were not strangers on a screen.
It was like having an out-of-body experience because those little kids who were running around and hiding and trying to get away from the Sondercommando — that was me. That was my friends.
From that screening forward, Leyson began speaking at schools and universities across the country. The memoir grew from the same impulse: to put on record what the film, in his view, had left out.
Leyson’s central complaint about the film was that Spielberg had dwelt on Schindler’s womanizing, war profiteering, and Nazi party membership without showing enough of the man’s basic decency. That gap is what the memoir was written to close. He returned to this point in a 2010 interview cited in his Los Angeles Times obituary.
He put everything on the line. Even to treat us as human beings was against the law.... He did it because he was a decent human being.
How he wrote it
Always from the head and the heartLeyson died in January 2013, eight months before publication, and never gave author interviews about the writing itself. His wife Elisabeth and Chapman University Holocaust educator Marilyn J. Harran completed the manuscript. What the record does preserve is how Leyson told the story across years of public speaking, and Harran, who had heard him many times at Chapman University, described a quality that carried over into the written work.
He always spoke without notes with total genuineness, unaware of how compelling a speaker he was. He never gave the same talk twice. It always came from the head and the heart.
His editor identified the same quality in the manuscript: a voice that was direct without being plain, and controlled without being cold. The observation was relayed through a Bookreporter feature on the book.
There is a grace there, a straightforward manner to the way he unfolded his story that held no room for hyperbole, no room for rancor.
That refusal of hyperbole extended to how he accounted for his own survival. In a 1994 Los Angeles Times interview, years before the memoir took shape, he was already insisting on the same honest arithmetic that runs through the book: chance, not cleverness, had kept him alive.
I can recount dozens of times where if I had stepped ... to my left, I would have been gone, or if I happened to step to my right. It wasn’t anything like being smart or clever or anything like that.
This refusal to claim more agency than the facts supported appears to have governed everything from his earliest public talks to the memoir’s final pages.
The personal thread
What the wooden box actually measuredLeyson was thirteen when Schindler placed him on the list of factory workers at the Emalia enamelware plant in Kraków. He was small enough at the time that he needed an upturned wooden box to reach the machinery, and the image became the memoir’s title and its emotional center. He spent thirty-nine years after immigration teaching the industrial arts he first learned on Schindler’s factory floor, a detail that connects the boy on the box directly to the man he became.
Five of us survived the war, this is the bottom line, out of everyone who was related to me in Poland. And we survived because we were on Schindler’s list.
The memoir’s texture comes not from abstract statements about survival but from specific sensory memories of Schindler himself. Leyson recalled the factory floor with the kind of physical precision that decades had not blurred.
You didn’t have to look to know that Schindler was there. He was all perfumed up and smoking these cigarettes. And he’d come through and he’d do things, not grandstanding or anything. He’d just quietly come up to my father, put his arm around his shoulder and say, ‘Don’t worry; everything is going to be OK.’
That image, Schindler’s arm around his father’s shoulder on a factory floor where kindness was against the law, is the scene Leyson returned to most often across fifty years of public speaking.
What he wants us to sit with
One person’s choice, counted exactlyLeyson presented the mathematics of his family’s survival without sentimentality and without any claim that the numbers amounted to a happy ending. Five people from an extended family across all of Poland. He wanted that figure held plainly, as the clearest possible argument for what one person’s decision could accomplish.
Five of us survived the war, this is the bottom line, out of everyone who was related to me in Poland. And we survived because we were on Schindler’s list.
In the memoir, Leyson reached for the writer Joseph Campbell’s definition of a hero, an ordinary human being who does the best of things in the worst of times, and applied it directly to Schindler. What he wanted readers to hold onto was that Schindler’s flaws were real and his choices were still real, and that the two facts did not cancel each other out. The cost of those choices was what Leyson kept returning to in interviews.
He put everything on the line. Even to treat us as human beings was against the law.... He did it because he was a decent human being.
Leyson also wanted readers to understand that survival left no room for self-congratulation. He said this explicitly in the same 1994 Los Angeles Times interview in which he described the factory floor, insisting that the difference between the living and the dead had nothing to do with intelligence, preparation, or worthiness.
I can recount dozens of times where if I had stepped ... to my left, I would have been gone, or if I happened to step to my right. It wasn’t anything like being smart or clever or anything like that.
Read together, these two positions, gratitude toward Schindler and absolute refusal to take credit for surviving, form the ethical spine of the memoir. Leyson wanted readers to see heroism in someone else and chance in himself.