Survivor Profile

In the Purim eves of his childhood, Herman Jakubowicz would watch his grandfather stride into shul—where the congregants waited, expectant—with a scroll tucked under his arm, heralding the transition from a day of fasting to a night of merrymaking. Theirs was the only megillah in Brod, a hamlet in the sub-Carpathian foothills of what was then Czechoslovakia and is now Ukraine. A third of the townspeople were Jews. Some were loggers and farmers; others owned flour mills, workshops, even a distillery.

Born in 1921 to Fanny and Leopold Jakubowicz, Herman was the eldest of five in an observant family. Life was good for Brod’s Jews so long as the Czech ruled. They were tolerant and obliging, even running extra trains on Fridays to accommodate pre-Sabbath travel. But Brod slipped into Hungarian control in 1939, bringing anti-Jewish restrictions, and by 1941 dozens of Jewish men, Herman among them, had been conscripted into Hungarian labor battalions. Circumstances grew worse when Herman’s labor camp fell into German hands.

But by September 1944, Russian artillery fire was audible. With nothing to lose, Herman and two friends escaped into the forest the day after Yom Kippur. Friendly Russian soldiers guided them away from the front—and within months, the war was over.

Herman headed home, but the Brod he knew had vanished. His father and mother? Gone. His siblings? Gone—to Auschwitz. (One, Jakob, survived.) Gone also were the rest of the 400 or so Jews who had lived in Brod in 1941.

The Jakubowicz home stood vacant, everything of worth seemingly taken. But Herman knew that Leopold had kept valuables in an attic crawl space. So up he went, his hunch rewarded with a revelatory find: the family megillah, amid a cache of other items, wrapped in cloth. It was easy to imagine his father hiding this treasure as best he could in the frenzied days before deportation.

This scroll, of course, told of an averted genocide—the dramatic tale of Esther, Mordecai, and Haman in the fifth century BCE—removed from Herman by thousands of miles and years. And it had survived another genocide, this one nearly successful, on lands his family knew intimately, in a past so recent his body and psyche still bore its marks.

After two years in Munich gaining education in clothing design, Herman found his way to America, bringing the megillah with him. He rebuilt his life in this country, a tale common to so many survivors yet unique to each. In Herman’s case, he married a widowed survivor, had a son, settled in Queens, and became a successful manufacturer of women’s outerwear, speaking often to his family of the megillah that linked him to a world lost. Several years before his death in 2000, Herman gave the scroll to his son, Len Jacobs, to safekeep.

“It was the safest place I could think of,” said Len Jacobs, his voice breaking as he explained the decision he and his wife, Genee, made to donate the megillah to the Holocaust Museum & Center for Tolerance and Education (HMCTE) in Suffern, New York, in 2016.

Ilona’s Story

My mom was born in 1916 in a small rural town in Eastern Hungary called Hajduboszemeny.

I never knew too much about what she went through during the war till I was in my late teens. Up until that point she wouldn’t talk about it too much.

When she did start to talk about it, I understood why she didn’t until I was a certain age.

She was married in 1936 when she was 20. My sister was born in Hungary in 1938.

In 1939 things started getting very dark for the Jews in Hungary- Hungary was a staunch ally of Germany and was following the Germans lead on how to treat the Jews.So my mom and her husband decided to move to Belgium thinking that it would be better there.

In May of 1940 Germany invaded and took over Belgium.

Immediately my mom who was pregnant with my brothe , my 2 year old sister and her husband tried to make a run to Pale Calais (Port of Calais ) where they heard that they may be able to be evacuated by sea to England.

They were marching to the sea with British Troops and being bombed and strafed with bullets by the German Air Force. Not realizing that they were walking right into the Battle of Dunkirk and witnessed the whole thing. Not being able to proceed they marched back to Belgium.

Six months later in 1941 her husband went back to Hungary on a reconnaissance alone hoping that it was better there. But it wasn’t he was arrested immediately and sent to Mutthausen concentration camp where he perished. My mom didn’t know what happened to him until the end of the war.

From 1941-1943 my mom lived in hiding in Antwerp Belgium with 2 little children and survived on her cunning wit and sense of survival to protect her two children. She was conversationally fluent in French, Dutch and German which helped her situation.

She was not holed up in an attic type of hiding but moved about avoiding round-ups of Jews. She worked as a seamstress and did odd jobs for the local resistance in Antwerp.

In 1943 through her connections with the resistance she travelled from occupied Belgium through occupied France to a safe house on the border of France and Switzerland where she was assisted into Switzerland with my brother and Sister.

Once in Switzerland she immediately began to work for the Red Cross in Geneva assisting orphans of the war. She continued to work for the Red Cross until the end of the war.

In 1946 she went back to Hungary to try to reconnect with her husband, but upon returning found out about his fate.

She then returned to Belgium and applied for a visa to the USA it took 2 years waiting in Belgium to obtain that .

In 1948 she finally arrived in the US and stayed with a sister in Wilkes Barre PA. In short order, she moved to Williamsburg Brooklyn, and met my father. .

My Father’s Aunt Lilly owned the rooming house where both my mother and father were staying. I guess they hit it off and were married on December 25th 1949. The only day my mother and father could get off.