The crowd in the Performing Arts Center burst into applause after Goldie Jacoby finished her story and thanked the audience for listening. Jacoby had just finished recounting her story of surviving the Holocaust and the struggles that came afterward.
Jacoby said she wanted to dedicate her life to speaking about what happened so it doesn’t happen again.
According to the president of Chabad at Cal Poly and experience industry management junior Steph Sussman, there were close to a thousand people at the event. This was the largest crowd Jacoby had spoken in front of.
“I do this only for one reason. I don’t want to die without the world knowing that it really happened, and it can happen again,” Jacoby said to the audience.
Sussman said students reached out to her and said this was not what they expected when they decided to come for a Holocaust speaker.
“She made people laugh and gasp and feel things that weren’t just like somber and sad,” Sussman said. “She made people happy and I think that is an incredible storytelling skill.”
This event, titled ‘“What Holocaust” with Goldie Jacoby,’ was organized by Chabad of SLO and Cal Poly, and is a product of the organization’s goal to bring a Holocaust speaker to campus every year.
Sussman was in charge of bringing Jacoby to campus, who currently lives in the Coachella Valley of Palm Springs. Sussman has a personal connection to her because her grandmother has been friends with Jacoby for forty years.
Jacoby began her story between ages five and six, when her parents visited her grandparents in a small town in Poland.
“You may ask, how does a five, six-year-old remember so much? I remember most of it because it was so traumatic that I remembered, and what I did not remember my mother filled in on the things I really missed out on,” Jacoby said to the audience.
Jacoby recounted how the German soldiers and Polish police came for her family in the town and how they hid and escaped through the forest.
She also recounted the horrors of having to hide in a pig sty for three years. Their only source of entertainment was picking the lice out of the seams of their clothes.
“Day after day of doing nothing, nothing, nothing,” Jacoby said to the audience.
After the war was over, Jacoby and her family went to a displaced persons camp run by the Americans in Austria. There was food and clothes for the Jewish refugees.
“You all people are so large compared to us,” Jacoby said in her speech. “We were very short and undernourished, and the clothing looked like three people could wear one jacket.”
Jacoby said the Jewish people in the camp made a community. There were two surviving teachers from the Warsaw ghettos and they taught the alphabet, art and crafts and math to the children.
“Because the Americans gave us chocolates and fathers the cigarettes so we were able to barter with the Austrians. I learned how to swim, I learned how to ski, things like that,” Jacoby had said.
The Red Cross made a list of survivors and a cousin of Goldie’s father recognized it, so they sponsored them to bring the family to America.
Jacoby’s family got put in housing under the superintendent. She described seeing rats come up to her mattress and living in horrible conditions because her cousin didn’t really care to go beyond sponsoring them.
“Finally they got us an apartment and my father and mother were looking for a job. So nobody raised me,” Jacoby in her speech. “They never had the time to raise me. I don’t know how I ended up sane.”
She was enrolled in school where she experienced bullying from the other children. They made fun of her and pulled her hair, and she couldn’t understand what they were saying because of the language barrier.
She moved to a Bet Yaakov called Williamsburg Hebrew Academy with three older girls there who had also survived the Holocaust.
“I had no idea really who I was, what I was. Nothing, just I enjoyed school because I really loved to learn,” she said at the event.
Her parents owned a candy store. During this time, she met her husband George.
George was also a Holocaust survivor who survived six concentration camps. They got married in June 1953 when she was sixteen, one month after she graduated from school.
Jacoby wrote an autobiography about her experiences called “What Holocaust?” and she wrote a biography for her husband called “God Forsaken.”
“And yet he still was a good human instead of being angry at the world,” Jacoby said to the audience. “He believed what I did. We both dedicated our lives to speak about what happened so it does not happen again.”
After telling her story, Sussman held a Q&A session with Jacoby where people texted their questions to the number on the screen.
“I think the Q&A really humanized her. The best, I think, was the end. I asked her a question about what her breakfast was every day,” Sussman said. “She’s not just a person on a stage, she’s a real human being that has breakfast every day, and so I think it was humanizing.”
Environmental engineering sophomore Adam Abraham came because he said it is very important. He is a religious Jewish student who observes the commandments and the Mitzvahs.
“I think it’s very important to support an event like this especially because also I have family that unfortunately went through the Holocaust,” Abraham said. “And as time is going on, we are unfortunately losing more and more of these amazing survivors and really their stories.”
