Auschwitz survivor Julius Jacobs shows the number tattooed on him by the… (Harry Fisher, The Morning…)
It was the morning of the first day of eighth grade, and Julius Jacobs was walking the 4 miles to school along pretty byways in the Polish city of Lodz, chatting with his friends and anticipating what the year would bring.
He was a clothier's son who lived modestly but comfortably with his parents, brother and sister in the textile center southwest of the capital, Warsaw. He had a lot of friends and he liked school well enough. He was 10 days shy of 14.
"We were excited, like everyone else," Jacobs recalled, sitting in the auditorium of the Jewish Community Center in Allentown one recent morning. "It was the beginning of the new year. We'd meet new teachers and friends."
It was Sept. 1, 1939.
This, of course, was the day Germany's Nazi regime gave up the pretext of acquiring territory through political manipulation, as with Austria and Czechoslovakia, and blasted into Poland with a strategy called blitzkrieg — literally, "lightning war." It was the original shock and awe, a display of armament and firepower that overwhelmed Polish defenses.
World War II had begun.
At school, Jacobs and his friends knew none of this. Lodz was far from the points of invasion. It wasn't until after school that they learned something was amiss. People were running in the streets, flocking to newsstands, gathering near radios.
"We went to a newsstand and they gave us the most shocking news," he said. "The German army had crossed the Polish border. … We were excited and afraid of things that might happen."
Naturally so. As the Nazi regime expanded, it had exported its poisonous policy of anti-Semitism to its new territories, stripping Jews of their property and civil rights. Lodz was home to more than 600,000 people, about a third of them Jews — the nation's second-largest such community after Warsaw — so the Jacobses and their friends and neighbors were more than unnerved by the prospect of the German army sweeping toward the city.
"My mother was in tears," Jacobs said. "She was afraid my father, brother and other men would be taken to fight the war. But the Polish army was defeated within a few days."
Everything seemed to happen with the same breathtaking speed. Tanks and soldiers streamed into Lodz. Polish governance gave way to German. Schools closed. Food became scarce. Families had to rise early to wait in long lines for bread.
The Germans chose a leader from the Jewish community to relay orders from the new rulers to the people. Among the first mandates: All Jews were compelled to wear a yellow star. That way, Jacobs said, they were easy to identify and could be snatched off the streets at the whim of the Nazis, who would set them to hard labor.
"Now came the second shock," Jacobs said, remembering the morning the family woke to the stench of smoke in the streets.
"They had burned all of our synagogues."
In the ghetto
Softly but insistently, in a voice that still carries the gentle accent of his homeland after decades in the United States, Jacobs, 88, of South Whitehall Township, told his tale with a narrative flow born of a thousand repetitions.
In many respects, it's the quintessential story of a Jew in Hitler's terrible empire, except its main character survives. Such accounts are being shared around the world today — Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day — to perpetuate the memory of those times, to remind the comfortable and the disengaged of the sudden, vicious political currents that can carry the world to catastrophe.
It happened to Jacobs, who watched helplessly with parents Mailech and Ruth and siblings Fred and Regina as everything changed around them in a matter of months.
In Lodz and Warsaw and other cities with large Jewish populations, the Nazis built ghettos, fenced-off wards of dense, execrable housing. At first, the Jews were merely confined to these areas, but soon they were forced to produce essential goods for the German war machine — "uniforms, boots, all necessary things for the soldiers," Jacobs said.
The Lo