On Friday, April 28, Xavier High School opened its doors to Dr. Jacob Eisenbach, a survivor of the Holocaust, to share his story. Dr. Eisenbach, 94 years old, strives to prevent genocide through his eyewitness account of the Holocaust. The presentation was given to juniors and seniors in the Regis-LaSalle theatre and was streamed live on the Xavier Facebook page for underclassmen and other schools to view.

“As  an eyewitness to the Holocaust, I have a moral obligation to tell you about the experiences I have endured under Nazi occupation,” Dr. Eisenbach said. “What I have to tell you is of global importance.”

Dr. Eisenbach began by detailing his happy childhood in Lodz, Poland. He grew up in a largely Jewish community with a loving family. But in his own words, his “youth ended and turned into an unimaginable nightmare” when the German Nazis invaded Poland and fenced off his hometown into a Jewish ghetto. At the age of 16, Dr. Eisenbach was cut off from the rest the world and given just enough food to survive.

Dr. Eisenbach talked about having his sister escape to the Russian side of Poland and his brother being stricken with Typhoid fever. Eisenbach talked about his experience hiding from his notice of deportation to a concentration camp. He described how he was ensconced in a padlocked room beneath a pile of straw, hoping that the policemen would not break the lock. He expressed how he believed it was a miracle that he was sent to the concentration camp only four months before the end of the war; the German Nazis destroyed the ghetto and the people of Lodz to erase their crime against humanity.

“I thought he gave a really good representation of what those people went through,” senior Adam Hagarty said. “It’s not easy stuff to talk about, and I think he did a wonderful job.”

Dr. Eisenbach ended the presentation by answering various questions submitted via social media. One student asked, “Have you lost faith in humanity?” Eisenbach answered with a hopeful question of his own: “How could I lose faith in humanity when such great humanitarians are walking on this earth?”

Lizzie Leu

News Writer