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Regina Jacob

Regina Jacob

May 20, 1924 - March 17, 2018

Regina Jacob, a Sheboygan resident and survivor of the Jewish Holocaust, decided in 2013 she was ready to share her story of survival. She gave a signed copy of her account to be added to the Jewish Holocaust Collection in the Fela and Anschel Warschau Room at Mead Public Library. Jacob wrote her testimony in 1996, but until then, had kept it private. The account begins, "All my sisters were killed by the Germans in Poland in World War II. There is no one of my family left."

This is the text:

All my sisters were killed by the Germans in Poland in World War II. There is no one of my family left.

Poland

My name is Regina Jacob. My maiden name was Shtrikman. My grandmother’s name on my mother’s side was Zimmerman. I was the youngest of four sisters.

We lived in in Szydlowiec, Poland in a ghetto area. My father had left my mother very early and I don’t even remember him. My mother sold vegetables to support us. She was always gone, so I raised myself.

Image removed.The oldest sister was Golda and she was married and had four children. My brother-in-law, Golda’s husband, was a shoemaker.

Chaja (pronounced Haya) was the next sister She lived with our father’s parent in Radom, Poland. My mother couldn’t take care of four girls, so they took one -- they took Chaya. She became more educated than we were. Afterwards, she lived in Warsaw with her husband and her child. She was a dressmaker. When her house was bombed, she moved, with her child and mother-in-law, back to Szydlowiec.

Hannah was a couple of years older than I was. She was never married, but at the time of the war, she had a boyfriend.

I never finished school. I want to school for a time, but then my mother told me not to go to school -- I wouldn’t learn anyhow.

My mother, at the early part of the war, was sick in the hospital and died of throat cancer during the war. When my mother was dying, nobody was allowed into the hospital, so I would just look in the window at my mother. She could see me, but she couldn’t talk. I was the only one who went to see her. She was in the hospital a few weeks and when she died, we had a funeral.

After my mother died, we all lived in the same house in the ghetto for a couple of years.

German Occupation

I was about 18 when the Germans came. Golda said it’s better I go with them. She had four kids, what could she do? I had a better chance alone, she said, and she was right. When the Germans starting picking up people, my sisters hid, and I was alone.

Later, I saw Hannah’s boyfriend in a concentration camp and he told me she had sent packages to me during this time, but I never got them.

I walked the street. The children they would throw down like potatoes onto the truck. I didn’t see them, but people told me. People were nothing to the Germans … just like animals … animals are treated better than that. To kill somebody for them was just nothing. Some people threw food down to us. They’re not all bad -- some of them felt sorry for us, but some of them couldn’t do anything, you know.

The Germans took me from the street -- I was just walking. I had no money, nothing. I was very sad. Somebody should have taken care of me. -- I was the youngest. Somebody should be here now so I could tell them this, but there’s nobody. I didn’t care that the Germans took me.

When I went with the Germans, I was sent to Scorshisk, a camp in Poland. They took thousands of us. The Germans had clothes from the people they had killed -- there were wagons full of clothes. They gave us clothes.

Every morning we had to go out and stand in a line. The Germans picked out the sick-looking people and sent them away to a crematorium. Every day, we had to go through that One woman made me a nice dress and we put makeup on. We wanted to look good. I was always strong looking, even on the heavy side. We didn’t get any breakfast. In the evening, we got a piece of bread and we left it for the morning, for breakfast.

We didn’t have much work in Scorshisk. We sorted out clothes and sorted out vegetables and they would give us a spoonful of soup.

Every day I was scared. They had a hospital there where you laid on straw bunk beds and every day, the Germans would come with a truck to see who is the sickest and they took them away. I went to the hospital to help out with the people and I got typhus. they put me in the hospital then because I was young -- if I was old, they would have taken me away.

One day, when I was sick with typhus, the Germans told me to come down from the bed. the nurse, she said to them, “Oh, she’s getting better already.” That must have been from God, so there would be at least one person left of my family. She told me to go back to bed.

After Scorshisk, they took us to Czestochowa, Poland, where I worked in an ammunition plant. The machine threw the ammunition out like cigarettes and I had to watch the machine to make sure it didn’t jam or something. I remember people, but I don’t remember the names.

You couldn’t talk to anybody in the factory. I made a mistake and I went outside, right by the door, just to visit and talk to somebody -- a man, a friend. the boss, he saw me and they took off and I got beat up.

In the camps were Jewish, Catholics, Russians, Pollacks, even gypsies. The rich people couldn’t take it, but I wasn’t rich and I could take it. When I saw Hannah’s boyfriend in a camp, he told me he had been with my sister and he was on the train or something and he escaped and he wanted her to go along, but she said she goes where her sisters go. She was killed. After a while, the boyfriend was gone too from camp and I never saw him again. I think he must have been killed too.

Golda’s husband was also once in a camp where I was. the men were separate, but I talked to him through the fence. He said that the Germans told him if he signed up to go home, he could go home. He said he signed up to go home. but these men who had signed up didn’t know -- they were not going to send them home. They sent him to a crematorium.

Chaya and her husband were together, going through it together. They both were killed. My sisters -- all of my sisters and all of their children -- were killed.

Germany

After Czestochowa, we went on a train to Burgau, Germany. On the train, there was no air, no windows, no toilet, no pails, It smelled. There was nothing to eat. They took dead people every day off the freight train. We were on the train a couple of weeks or so and when we first got to Burrow, we sat outside with all our belongings from Poland. They didn’t know what to do with us. They had no work for us. We thought they were going to get rid of us.

When we got to Germany, there were no men. We didn’t see any men -- no Jewish men and no German men. The German women were worse than men -- they beat us. After a couple of day, they put us in a shower room. They took everything from us, so nobody had nothing, and we showered in cold water. Then they gave us uniforms to wear. Then we walked.

We walked from one city to another. For weeks we walked. We slept outside in the rain and some people couldn’t walk; they got sick. One woman right if front of me, she had a convulsion. They left her there. If you couldn’t walk, they either shot you or they left you there. Still, we liked it better -- walking, than being on the train. when the Americans came closer, they took us farther and farther and farther.

The Germans were so secretive and nobody knew what they were going to do next. After a while, people talk,, you know -- you find out. We used to see the smoke from far away from the crematoriums. A couple of miles away we could see the smoke.

We didn’t think about nothing. We just thought they were going to kill us or something -- that’s what we were frightened about. You get used to the fear.

The German soldiers with guns walked on both sides of us. Near the end, they said we should hold on, that pretty soon it would be over and we would be free. They had papers -- orders-- to get rid of us by the end, to kill us. But they didn’t do it because they wanted to save themselves.

Allied Occupation

I was in camps for three and a half years. When the Americans came, first the black soldiers came in. We hugged them, kissed the. That was in Alach, Germany, close to Munich. They come in with tanks and motorcycles and they were nice to us and they gave us everything we needed. We could eat anything we wanted. All over there was food. At that time, there were men -- even French men -- and after a while we saw that there were lots of men there at the camp. The men joined the women and we raided the Germans’ basements, where they lived, for food.

We stayed in the camps for a while where they gave us food. I think the food came from the Americans. The French men, they sent them back home. But we didn’t have no place to go -- we had no home. After a while, I moved to Munich and got a place from a German woman -- somebody paid for it.

I met Mayor Jacob on the bus -- he lived in Felderfein. He came on the bus looking for some family that lived next door to where I lived. I showed him where the person lived. Every day he came on the bus with his friend. I asked my Mayor, “Why you always bring him along?” and he finally came alone. In 1945, I moved in with Mayor in Felderfein.

After the War

After a while, in 1946, we got married. It wasn’t a big wedding. He had been in the camps, like I was. He had a big family but everyone’s gone except one brother, who now lives in Milwaukee.

Our daughter, Gale, was born in 1948 in Germany and we moved to Sheboygan, Wisconsin a year later. We came on a ship through Boston. We brought one wooden box with dishes and silverware -- no money, nothing. The Jewish community of Sheboygan sponsored us and found us jobs and a place to live. My son, Max, was born in Sheboygan in 1950.

I have never returned to Poland.