Kati O’Hare
“You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
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It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear —
You’ve got to be carefully taught
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade —
You’ve got to be carefully taught
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late —
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate —
You’ve got to be carefully taught!”
Lyrics from a 1949 musical entitled “South Pacific”
MONTROSE — Rudolph Jacobson played this popular song from the controversial 1949 musical, “South Pacific,” at the end of his presentation about his life to Columbine Middle School students Friday. (See related story.)
A Jew born in Germany in 1933, he knows all to well about hate, and challenged students to look beyond differences.
Jacobson’s family faced many hardships and were witnesses to the devastation hate can cause. They saw their place of worship burned and friends and loved ones hauled off to concentration camps. Their rights and freedoms were stripped and their homeland segregated. They were left no choice but to leave their life behind to search for something better.
The Shoah
Jacobson was born Rudolf Israel Cohen in Insterbur, East Prussia, Germany on May 11, 1933. His birth fell just five months after Adolf Hitler, founder of the Nazi Party, became chancellor of Germany. Jacobson’s middle name “Israel” was given to him by the Nazis to identify him as a Jew.
Jacobson was born into a well-to-do family. His grandparents on his mother’s side owned a small department store and several farms. Eric Jacobson, Rudolph’s stepfather, was the buyer for the ladies ready-to-wear department in a large department store where they lived in Bamberg, Germany. But the Holocaust, or “Shoah” in Hebrew, changed everything.
“All this was taken away from me,” Jacobson said.
After its defeat in World War I, Germany was humiliated by the Versailles Treaty, which reduced its army, territory and asked for recognition of guilt for the war, according the Jewish Virtual Library. The new Weimar Republic that was formed suffered economic instability and many people where out of work.
“The Jews were a great scapegoat,” Jacobson said. “(Germany) had lost WWI and we were the scapegoat of all Germany’s problems.”
And so the Nazis’ propaganda campaign began.
Jacobson remembers the radio trying to convince the public that Jews were to blame. The weekly Nazi Newspaper Der StŸrme (The Attacker) was also a major tool in the “brainwashing” assault. On the bottom of the front page of each issue was printed in bold letters, “The Jews are our misfortune!” and in 1938, circulation was at a half million.
Jacobson said life for Jews became miserable and segregated with the creation of the Nuremberg Laws. The first law protected “German Blood and German Honor” by prohibiting marriage and other relations between Jews and Germans. The laws also took away German citizenship. Jews faced many of the same prosecutions that African Americans faced in the South. They were only allowed to shop, eat and visited Jewish-owned places.
“So harassment continues and my parents saw no future for us or our children in Germany,” Jacobson said, but their quota number for U.S. citizenship was still four years down the list.
Many older German Jews, like his grandparents, thought it would be a passing stage and would not leave. He said it was those thoughts that led to their murder on the way to a concentration camp in 1943.
The night of broken glass
An early memory Jacobson shares with his audience is witnessing, along with his father, the “Kristallnacht,” the night of broken glass.
November 1938, a 17-year-old Jew walked into the German embassy and killed a German officer. This gave Hitler the excuse to launch a pogrom against German Jews. Jacobson said mobs of Hitler’s “brown shirts” attacked the Jewish streets. Nearly 1,400 synagogues were burned, around 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed and at least 100 Jews were killed, with hundreds injured. Jacobson hid with his father across the street as smoked rolled from their synagogue.
The next morning, a Gestapo, German Secret State Police, knocked on the door of their home and arrested his father.
“There was no explanation,” Jacobson said, to where his father was being taken or when he would be returned. According to the Library, 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps that morning. Jacobson’s mother was told her husband was being held in “protective custody” to keep him safe from the beatings the Jews took the night before.
Five weeks later, Jacobson, his mother and his months-old half-brother, received a postcard from Dachau, the first regular concentration camp established by the Nazis. The postcard, which Jacobson displays at his presentations, let them know his father was there and explained the proper way to communicate with him.
For Jews to be let out of the camp, in the early stages of the Holocaust, families had to provide proof that they would leave the country and how.
During this time, Jacobson said there were only two places that would accept Jews, Cuba and China. His family chose to go to Cuba because it would be the closest to the U.S. when their citizenship came up.
The departure
To improve their world image, he said, the Germans offered a ship to carry 937 passengers to Cuba. All the passengers were Jews except one German spy carrying documents to a Cuban spy. The Jews had to pay large prices for their tickets and were also made to buy a return ticket just in case.
Jacobson’s family loaded their possessions in the presence of a Gestapo. They were required to list all their assets and any with value, like silver platters and bowls, were not allowed. Jacobson displays the packing list for his audience, which shows crossed out items they had to leave behind.
They boarded the S.S. St. Louis two days before its departure and Jacobson celebrated his sixth birthday aboard the ship. It was a 14-day voyage, but when the St. Louis saw land, they were told their landing-permits were no good and they would have to turn back.
The distress of the news led several aboard to attempt and commit suicide, according to the Library. Twenty-two passengers had acquired immigration visas before departing and were allowed to disembark.
“The American government wouldn’t let us in either, even though most of the Jewish refugees on the ship had U.S. quota numbers and would have been eligible to immigrate within six to nine months,” he said. “Had Roosevelt and the U.S. government allowed these refugees in to the country and interned them, as they did the Japanese during WWII, all would have been saved.”
The ship spent several days drifting along the coast of Cuba and the U.S., waiting for negotiations to reside.
“As it turned out the ship went back to Europe and these Jews ended up in France, Belgium, Holland and England ... less than half of those that ended up back on the European continent survived.”
The Jacobson family was included in the 181 refugees the Dutch government allowed in Holland because they were with an infant, his half-brother.
The family lived at the Heijplaat Camp surrounded by barbed-wine, chain link fence, Dutch police and German Shepard dogs.
“Even though things were precarious for the family — us kids still had fun and got into trouble,” he said to the audience as he told stories of his youth adventures.
In November 1939, while still at the camp, the Jacobson’s quota number came up, they boarded the Ms. Beendam and arrived in Hoboken, N.J. on Feb. 5, 1940.
Life in America
Jacobson had to assimilate into their new American life, and graduated from high school at age 18. The next year his father died at age 50. He said that his father was never the same after Dachau and the two never talked about the camp.
He said that he was deprived of his childhood and love and attention from his parents because they had to work so hard to establish themselves again in a new country.
“You could say that all this adversity made me a better person; I doubt it. It was not by choice but rather a matter of necessity,” Jacobson wrote in an e-mail.
When talking to his audience he reiterates the thoughts his grandfather once had, that it could never happen.
“It could happen,” he said. “Unless you and the next generation do something about it. We all have to live together. We all have to live in the same world and try to come together. We haven’t done a good job ... there is still all the ‘isms.’ You need to look at what we have in common, not our differences.”
Contact Kati O’Hare via e-mail at katio@montrosepress.com
marqthompson wrote on Feb 1, 2010 3:21 AM:
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marqthompson
Noosa real estate "
Kaitlyn Heichel wrote on Nov 3, 2009 2:01 PM:
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