Takeaways – Life. Lessons. Learned.
Lucy Jacobs
This is a story of a miracle in the midst of tragedy, a story that must be told and must be heard. Lucy Jacobs turns 95 years young this summer, but by the glory of God she is here to tell the story of what happened to her along with six million Jews in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The takeaway from this powerful episode is as simple as this: to hear her first-hand account and bear the truth.
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1928. Lucy was one of seven children, and is the only one left. Her father was a veterinarian, a taxpayer, and helped whomever he could. Yet she, her parents and siblings, along with millions of other Jews, were torn from their homes by radio announcement and moved to locked ghettos within their own city. Soon they were placed on a cattle train to Auschwitz.
Betrayal, suffering, and survival
Lucy describes her arrival at the concentration camp; what follows is an account of unfathomable darkness. At merely 14 years of age, she was torn from her mother who was sent to die in the gas chambers, and found herself alone, naked, bald, and barefooted. She was left freezing cold, and nearly died of hunger within the first five days. The betrayal came by way of politics, when Jewish citizens who had done nothing wrong were burned to ashes, without so much as a body left to bury. Lucy asks, “I don’t know why they picked the Jews. What did we do?”
She suffered every day – either by hunger, disease, sorrow, or shock. But she describes herself as feisty, a hard worker, and raised with strong faith in God. She survived Auschwitz, the Auschwitz Death March, and came out alive from the Bergen-Belsen death camp. Lucy was clever, attesting her very survival to the will of God so that she could tell us her story.
Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British in 1945, and Lucy carved a path toward a better life by way of extended family, children, and moving to America in 1950. Her story is captivating and a sobering reminder of how evil can flourish if we let it. Lucy speaks six languages from her time in the concentration camps talking with Hungarians, Polish, Czechs, and more. She still bears the number tattoo placed on her arm after six months at Auschwitz, a step which she interpreted to mean that they would not take her life.
Takeaways From This Episode
Other Key Takeaways in this episode include:
- You do what you have to do in life, take it as it comes.
- Everybody has a different story.
- Life is not easy. As long as you are not in a concentration camp, you can live through it.
- Age is just a number
I urge you to hear Lucy’s story in full, to help fulfill her purpose for survival. She tells us, “when I came to the USA, I said to myself someone has to tell the world what happened. And I decided I’m going to do it. As long as God keeps my brain, I will tell my story.”
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