The tattoo on Michael Jacobs’ arm was a number: 118860.
The mark remained skin deep his entire life. It served as a reminder to him, and for others, that he had spent his teen years in a Nazi concentration camp. From 1939-45, the former Mendel Jakudowicz of Poland was forced to live life in one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz.
After the war, Jacobs found a home in Dallas. A few decades ago, he started traveling the country, telling his story to congregations at churches and to anyone who would listen. He called himself a Holocaust survivor. He’d even traveled back to the Old Country and toured the death camp he somehow survived. He wanted to remember every detail; every injustice; the loss of human dignity; the macabre sights and sounds; the ancient hateful prejudices unleashed ferociously among his neighbors, the German people. He told me his story when I was a reporter in a small Texas town where he was booked to speak at the Methodist church. Listening to his horrific ordeal, I envisioned gray scenes in the dead of winter: people with somber expressions frozen in black and white images, silent yet dignified.
A bright-eyed 15-year-old boy entering Camp Auschwitz, Jacobs first saw ovens. Optimistically he thought his captors were going to teach him the trade of a baker. He soon found the ovens were used to destroy human remains. Nothing was joyous about life in Auschwitz where prisoners were sentenced to slavery or death. Their crime was their religion.
As the Nazis were coming to power—incited by their beloved leader Adolph Hitler—Jacobs’ family was forced to leave their home and move into ghettos. And from there, residents were collected and packed into trains heading to various concentration camps. His family divided, Jacobs faced uncertainty in a concentration camp alone. He was stripped of his clothes and issued a numbered wool uniform with black and white stripes and a matching cap. The tattoo procedure was painful.
Jacobs was assigned to accompany a young Nazi soldier and told to follow his orders. He obeyed, wanting nothing more than to survive the times.
Back in prison, Jacobs and other able-bodied males had to search Allied planes shot down by the Germans. They were to break down the parts into salvageable piles of scrap metal. The forced laborers had to be very good, as Jacobs said, “One wrong move and we went under the oven.”
Ironically Jacobs was learning a lucrative trade. When he immigrated to America in 1951, settling in Dallas, he founded a scrap metal business which became prosperous.
During internment, Jacobs dealt with deep depression. In whispered conversations, inmates would encourage each other. “Why don’t you look up at the sky,” he recalled one man saying to him one night when he was feeling particularly down. “See how the stars smile at us?”
As he lay on a filthy bunk in a cold, crowded dormitory, he would close his eyes. He imagined himself as a bird: soaring above the screams, gunshots, and stench. Meditation was a form of escape. “At that time, I was free,” he told me.
After enduring hell on earth for several years, one day the prisoners awakened to find the camp’s cruel commanders gone. The prisoners had heard the Allies soon were coming. Jacobs took cautious steps to leave, unsure if this were another hoax and he would be shot. Slowly he gained confidence and then ran away. Tired and weak, he stopped at a house and was welcomed inside. Still wearing his prison camp clothes, he didn’t recognize himself when he looked in the mirror. He had aged decades. He stood on a scale and weighed less than 100 pounds.
Eventually he would learn that 80 of his family members, including his parents and siblings, did not survive the war. Jacobs was alone to learn the ways of the world.
He said what got him through the horror he endured was positive thinking. He held no bitterness toward his captors. Life, he could say as an old man, had been good.
The power of positive thinking is the human spirit. Jacobs’ survival skill was his tolerance of those who hated him—and his understanding that the world had gone mad for a little while.