On May 8, 3:51 am, The Revd <peel...@degenerate.Grik> wrote:
> On Mon, 7 May 2012 17:46:26 -0700 (PDT),Michael Ejercito
>
>
>
> <
mejer...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >On May 7, 10:52 am, The Revd <peel...@degenerate.Grik> wrote:
> >> On Mon, 7 May 2012 09:53:45 -0700 (PDT),Michael Ejercito
>
> >> <
mejer...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >> > The following article is about the horror at Ebensee.
>
> >> >Horror at Ebensee
>
> >> >by Jeff Jacoby
>
> >> Oy vey! Such a horror already! LOL
> > It is hardly surprising that a Nazi nithing like you would find
> >that amusing, boy.
>
> It is hardly surprising that a craven gook who sucks jew rectums would
> not find it amusing.
Normal people do not find it amusing, nithing.
>
> > In the meantime, your Holocaust education continues.
>
> In the meantime, you keep reposting jew lies that nobody reads.
Your Holocaust education continues, boy.
The following article is about a survivor of Auschwitz and Ebensee.
My hero, my father
by Jeff Jacoby
The American Enterprise
September 2000
http://www.jeffjacoby.com/842/my-hero-my-father
"I WANT TO DO SOMETHING with my life," I told my father. "I want to
accomplish something. What have you ever accomplished?" It was an
awful thing to say, cruel and smug and snotty. The only plea I can
enter in my defense is that I was 14 at the time and like every
adolescent, the one thing in this world I could see with crystal
clarity was my father's clay feet.
No man is a hero to his valet, the aphorism runs. Perhaps no father is
a hero to his adolescent son. But even at 14, I should have known
better than to ask what my father had ever accomplished. He had made a
good marriage to a good woman, with whom he was raising five children
in a home filled with love, laughter, and integrity. Pedestrian
achievements? In my father's case, they were nothing short of heroic.
* * *
On the day after Passover in 1944, my father and his family were
rounded up by the Nazis. Along with other Jewish families from their
region of eastern Slovakia, they were taken from their homes and
transported to a ghetto in the nearby Hungarian city of
Satoraljaujhely. For six weeks they were kept in the ghetto, which
grew increasingly crowded as more and more Jews were brought in. Then
it began to empty, as Jews were taken out.
They left on a Thursday. With only the belongings they could carry by
hand, they were marched to the waiting train. As each boxcar filled,
its doors were chained and locked. There were no seats inside, no
windows, no water. The only toilet was a bucket on the floor. For
three days of suffocation, thirst, and stench, the train moved. When
it stopped, David and Leah Jakubovic and their five youngest children
-- Franceska, Markus, Zoltan, Yrvin, and Alice -- were at Auschwitz.
The doors opened. There were blinding floodlights, shouting SS guards,
snarling dogs. The Jews were forced off the train and onto the
platform; men and women were made to line up separately. "Raus! Raus!"
they heard. "Out! Out!" In the noise and the confusion, they made
their way along the platform at the end of which Dr. Mengele waited,
performing the "selection." Some Jews he waved to the right, some to
the left. My father, a strong 18-year-old, was sent to the left. His
clothes were removed, his head was shaved, and a number -- A-10502 --
was tattooed on his arm. My father's mother and father and his
youngest brother and sister went the other way. Later he learned that
they had been taken immediately to the gas. Yrvin was 10 years old.
Alice was 8.
Markus Jakubovic (later Mark Jacoby) in 1945
Within a day or two, my father's other brother, Zoltan, was also
killed. His sister Franceska lasted a few months longer. Of the seven
members of the Jakubovic family who were rounded up by the Germans in
the spring of 1944, only one -- my father -- was still alive in the
spring of 1945. By then, he had been through four concentration camps.
At the end he was in Ebensee, a satellite of the grim Mauthausen camp
near Salzburg, Austria. He was 19 years old, he weighed 65 pounds, and
he was dying of typhus and starvation. When the Allies arrived at
Ebensee, my father was nearly a corpse. He would spend the next month
in a delirious fever in a field hospital. Later he would learn that he
had also contracted a form of tuberculosis.
His trials didn't end when the war did. He made his way back to his
native village in Slovakia, only to discover that strangers had helped
themselves to his family's small house. He struggled to support
himself -- buying this, selling that, smuggling something else. Making
a living would have been a daunting prospect for anyone in war-
blighted Eastern Europe in 1945. What must it have been like for a
young death camp survivor with no family, no property, and no home?
In 1948, the Communists seized control in Czechoslovakia. My father,
desperate not to be trapped again in a totalitarian dictatorship, got
out. He managed to procure an American student visa and to raise the
price of an ocean crossing. He got off the boat in New York on May 14,
1948 -- and was robbed on his first night in America. It is almost
literally true to say that my father started out in the New World with
only the shirt on his back.
He went to work as a manual laborer, nailing window sashes in a
carpenter's shop. After a while he tried his hand at sales: mattresses
first, then appliances, then furniture. In time he opened a furniture
and appliance store of his own. His initial visa authorized him to
stay in America for no more than one year. He has been here, so far,
for 52.
* * *
In all my years growing up in my father's house, when money was often
very short and luxuries were few, I cannot recall ever hearing him
complain about his circumstances. It is as if he decided that, after
Auschwitz, no setback or misfortune was worth even a moment's self-
pity. Nor can I ever recall hearing him boast -- about anything.
Perhaps he was never one to blow his own horn. Or perhaps he lost the
urge to brag once he saw the utter degradation to which human beings
can be reduced.
My father makes a point of giving some money to charity every day. I
asked him one time, after watching him slip a few dollars to a
panhandler who clearly had no good excuse to be scrounging for
handouts, why he gave money to somebody so patently undeserving. "It's
not my job to decide if he deserves," he told me. "A man came up to me
with an empty hand. When somebody asks for help and holds out his
hand, you don't turn him away."
That was, for him, a pretty long speech. He is not an especially
eloquent man and to my knowledge he has never spoken before an
audience. He still talks with an accent and sometimes garbles his
syntax. But actions speak louder than words, and those who know my
father have always known what kind of man he is.
His store was never a great success. He is not a born salesman, and
never learned the art of talking uncertain customers into buying
something they weren't sure they wanted. Nor was he much good at
leaning on customers who had taken delivery of some furniture or an
appliance, but couldn't be bothered to keep up their payments.
Nevertheless, he earned a name for himself, as he learned during the
"long, hot summer" of 1968.
When race riots erupted in Cleveland that year, my father's furniture
store stood at Ground Zero -- at St. Clair and 103d, in the heart of
the city's Glenville neighborhood. For days, the area was wracked by
pillaging and arson; the violence was made worse by the mayor's order
that all white police officers stay out. To deter looters, signs
reading "Soul Brother" appeared in the windows of black-owned
establishments, but there was no such sign in my father's window and
by the time it was safe enough for him to venture back into the city,
he expected to find his store reduced to a burnt-out shell.
He found it untouched. The pawn shop next door had been gutted and the
rioters had ransacked the A&P supermarket across the street, but
Mark's Furniture & Appliance Co. hadn't suffered so much as a broken
window. At the height of the riots, my dad later found out, a group of
tenants who lived in the apartment units above the store had come down
to the street and formed a human chain in front of the entrance. "Stay
away from this place," they told the looters. "It belongs to a good
man."
* * *
Once I asked my father if there was anything that had been uppermost
in his mind when he was in the camps. Was there something he always
concentrated on, some purpose he always clung to, a goal he always
kept in mind?
No doubt I was hoping to hear something lapidary. Something like the
exhortation of Simon Dubnov, the renowned Jewish historian whose last
words before being murdered in the Riga Ghetto were, "Yiddin, schreibt
und farschreibt" -- "Jews, write it down, write it all down." Perhaps
my father would tell me that he tried to remember everything so he
could one day bear witness to what he had seen. Perhaps he would say
that he always looked for ways to sabotage the Nazi operations. Or
that he never stopped dreaming of revenge. Or that every morning and
every night he recited the Sh'ma, the Jewish credo: "Hear, O Israel,
the Lord is our God, the Lord is One."
This is what my father told me: He was always careful to watch his
shoes. He slept at night with his shoes beneath his head, he said,
because if you lost your shoes you wouldn't survive for long.
It was hardly the answer I had imagined. I had expected something
inspiring, something courageous. Shoes? In the middle of the most evil
hell ever created on earth, my father was thinking about his shoes?
But I have come to understand that my father was right. If shoes were
essential to his survival -- and when you are force-marched from
Poland to Austria in the open in January, they are -- then shoes were
precisely the thing he had to think about. The Jakubovic family, awash
in blood, was nearly extinct. My father had to survive. The Jews had
to survive. Somehow, despite everything, they had to go on, and if
shoes could keep this Jew alive, then nothing were more important than
shoes.
Some Holocaust survivors emerged from their ordeal embittered and
angry. Some came out cynical and untrusting. Some survivors, furious
with God for not stopping the slaughter, turned their backs on faith
and became enemies of religion. Some sank into black depression. Some
slowly lost their minds.
Mark and Arlene Jacoby, surrounded by children and grandchildren in
2006.
If my father had done nothing but survive the Holocaust, his life
would be worthy of note. That he survived as a decent man and a
believing Jew, that he can still laugh and love and look on life's
bright side, is nothing less than magnificent.
My father turned 75 this year. He has five children and -- so far --
15 grandchildren. He keeps the Sabbath and fasts on Yom Kippur and
eats matzo on Passover. Every morning and every evening, he says the
Sh'ma. He is a Jew who survived and who survived as a Jew. His life is
a continuing defeat for Hitler, who had hoped to rid the world forever
of men such as my father. In an age thin in heroes, my father is mine.
What did he ever accomplish? I never again asked such an insulting
question.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)