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 Lodz ghetto, created in December 1939, "was a notorious, man-made hell on earth," said Alan Adelson, a writer and documentarian from New York who has chronicled the history of the ghetto in two films — "Lodz Ghetto" and "Sequel to Lodz Ghetto" — and several books.
Unlike the Warsaw ghetto, Lodz was "hermetically sealed," Adelson said. No one could get in or out without German sanction. Its boundaries were protected by military guards who would shoot on sight anyone caught outside the fence without permission.
Jacobs said his family and others were forced out of their homes, marched into the 4-square-kilometer ghetto and assigned to single-room apartments. They had no toilet or running water and nothing but a wood-burning stove for heat, though there was little wood available and families had to scrounge for anything that could be used for fuel.