Holocaust Survivor: Mike Jacobs' Triumph over Tragedy by Mike Jacobs

Author:Mike Jacobs [Jacobs, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Mike Jacobs Holocaust Education Foundation, Inc.
Published: 2013-05-06T23:00:00+00:00

I Become a Partisan

JOINING THE UNDERGROUND IN BIRKENAU, 1944. Some of the airplanes that came into the salegabetrieb still had fuel in their tanks. The fuel had glycerin or something in it. Prisoners would come to the planes, knock a hole in the fuel tank and drink the liquid. That liquid would make them so high that you could almost see their heads spinning. I remember one day the German air force man saying, “They should not drink that fuel.They will go blind or even kill themselves.”

“Why can’t they drink this?” I asked.

“Because it’s poisonous!” he said, explaining the effects of the chemicals.

I went to the guys who were drinking the fuel and said, “Don’t drink that fuel—you will go blind!”

The prisoners didn’t pay any attention to me, just went right on drinking the fuel. Some of the prisoners went blind; others died. The prisoners didn’t care. For the moment, they were happy and could forget where they were. I decided to take a sharp piece of metal and make holes in the fuel tanks before the planes were pushed into the salegabetrieb. Even though I did this, those tanks still dripped fuel. I could see the other prisoners gathering around those tanks to catch whatever they could, just to feel happy for a little while and forget their pain.

Sometimes the trains brought in other things besides the shot-down airplanes. One time there was a railroad car filled with potatoes, that was supposed to stay outside the work area. I left the “potato” car attached and the engineer pushed it inside along with the rest of the railroad cars carrying the airplanes. I told the other guys that I knew where I had left the car. They went over, crawled through the windows, and threw out the potatoes to the other people who were waiting outside.

The work group I was assigned to had thirty people, including Russian prisoners of war. The Russian prisoners ranked from lieutenant to general but the generals did not go to work. I was the only little Jewish boy in this work unit. The kappo in charge was a political prisoner from Austria. At one point the Russian prisoners came to me and asked me to tell them which airplanes had machine guns in their wings. I started pointing out to the Russians the planes with guns in their wings and never thought anything more about it.

I continued doing my job as ranger master, coupling and uncoupling the railroad cars. I did this every day. When we were finished, I used to go sit inside the train engine room with the air force man and feed coal into the fire to keep the water hot. The trains in Birkenau ran on steam so we had to keep the water hot all the time.

One winter day, I decided to go into the kappo’s little tent to eat my soup, where it would be a little warmer. When I went inside, I saw some of the Russian prisoners holding something that I didn’t like.

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