Notice of achievement received by a boy in a Łódź ghetto orphanage

Jakub (Jakob) Lapides was born on November 15, 1928, in Łódź, Poland. He had three siblings: Mosze (Moshe) born 1925, Sara, born 1926, and Miriam, born 1932. Their parents died in the late 1930s and the children were placed in orphanages. Łódź was occupied by German troops one week after Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The city was renamed Litzmannstadt and in February 1940, the Jews were forced into a ghetto in a small section of the city. For a while, this actually improved the children's living conditions because the chairman of the Jewish council, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, arranged for children in orphanages to get extra food rations. The children in the orphanage did not have to go out and work, although they were responsible for chores around the home. Rumkowski asked members of the Beirat to adopt some of the children and Jakob’s sister, Sara, was adopted by a family. During the Gehsperre Aktion in September 1942, when large numbers of children and the elderly were targeted for deportation to concentration camps by the Germans, Jakob and his siblings fled the orphanage and hid in the cemetery. While they were hiding, they saw men bring huge soup pots into the courtyard of the orphanage. Unable to resist their hunger, they ran over and got in the food line. While they were waiting, Germans trucks drove in. They had not gotten their food yet, but Jakob remembered saying to his siblings: “let’s go back to the cemetery. I went back. But not Moshe, and not Miriam, they did not come back. I saw that they boarded the trucks.” He stayed hidden in the cemetery for two days, but could hear “noises and screams coming from far away from the ghetto.” He finally decided to go live with his maternal aunt, Lola, because the orphanage no longer existed. She lived with her four year daughter, Mania, who lived with Jakob’s grandmother, ZIsi, and another aunt, Reisel. During the Aktion, Jewish policeman had come and ordered everyone to go down to the courtyard. Lola hid Mania in the attic and went down, but their grandmother was bedridden and could not walk down. The policeman went up to search the building and, finding the grandmother in bed, threw her out the window onto a cart filled with corpses. He found work in a leather and saddler workshop, and later, in a sausage making factory. While there, he got seriously ill from eating spoiled horse meat, but he was so hungry that he continued to eat it. He joined a Communist youth group. Then in March 1944, he was deported to a HASAG concentration camp in Czestochowa. HASAG [Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft], was the third largest consumer of forced and slave labor during the war; it produced infantry rocket launchers and other munitions. Jakub was at this camp when it was liberated by Soviet forces in January 1945. Jakob returned to Łódź and took a job in a bakery so he would never be hungry again. Eventually he returned to school, graduating from high school and continuing to college where he earned an engineering degree. He married a fellow survivor and they had two sons. In 1957, the family emigrated to Israel. Jakob died, age 77, in 2005.

The picture postcard was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2005 by Jakob Lapides.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Jakob Lapides