(b. 1924 in Oswiecim) was 15 years old when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. In March of 1941, the Germans forced the Jews to leave Oswiecim, and Jacob’s family was relocated to the Chrzanow ghetto. Shortly thereafter, the Germans began deporting people from the Chrzanow ghetto to forced labor camps, and in May, the Germans sent Jacob to a camp in the German city of Wiesau. He never saw his father or three of his four sisters again.
From 1941 to 1944, Jacob worked in forced labor camps in German cities of Wiesau, Sakrau, Klettendorf, and Freiburg. Pictured below is a photograph of Jacob (front center) shoveling on the Autobahn during his time at the Kettendorf camp. Jacob had this photograph taken by a German guard and sent to his family in the Chrzanow ghetto in return for a blanket – an act that could have cost him his life.
In 1944, Jacob was taken to the Waldenburg concentration camp, which was run by the ruthless SS. In Waldenburg, his tormentors knew Jacob as prisoner number 64242. Jacob likes to point out that the sum of the numbers 64242 is 18. The number 18 in Hebrew consists of two letters, Chet and Yud, which spells the Hebrew word Chai, meaning life.
A day at Waldenburg consisted of rising before daybreak after which, following role call, the prisoners were marched to work. They returned in the evening to their barracks for their only meal of the day, which consisted of a ration of soup and bread. Prisoners who became sick or unable to work were put to death at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp twenty miles away. Jacob, as a bricklayer, was given the job of installing iron bars in a storage house for food. He secretly supplemented his diet with food from the storage facility, yet feared that since he did not look as emaciated as the other prisoners, he would be discovered. The Soviet army liberated the Waldenburg camp on May 8, 1945.
Jacob met his wife Hilda in Weiden, Germany at the end of the war and took a job with the United States Army. In July of 1949, Eugene Freedheim, an attorney in Cleveland, Ohio sponsored the immigration of Jacob, Hilda, and their infant son, Michael, to the United States.
Now retired from the drapery business, Jacob is dedicated to remembrance of the Shoah (Holocaust). He lectures at local schools and is a member of the Kol Israel Foundation, an organization of Holocaust survivors.