Holocaust survivor to speak in Spokane Thursday

Dr. Jacob Eisenbach was 16 years old when the Nazis invaded Poland. He survived a concentration camp, but 100 other members of his immediate and extended family did not.

Eisenbach, 93, will be in Spokane on Thursday to speak about his experiences during the Holocaust and why what happened should not be forgotten. His talk, hosted by Chabad of Spokane County, begins at 7 p.m. at the Spokane Convention Center.

“This is my mission, the mission of my life during my retirement,” said Eisenbach, who retired from a 60-year career as a dentist in 2015. “It’s to spread the word about what happened and stop genocide, so that someday we’ll be able to say with confidence, never again.”

Eisenbach grew up in Lodz, Poland, with an older sister, Fala, and two younger brothers. His brother Sam was two years younger and Henry was four years younger.

“I grew up in a wonderful family,” he said.

Everything changed on Sept. 1, 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland. They quickly took control of Lodz, the second-largest city. “That started a series of unimaginable events,” Eisenbach said. “We never expected anything like the things that actually happened.”

The Nazis fenced off a section of the city to create a ghetto to house 160,000 Jews and ordered everyone inside by May 1, 1940.

“Any Jew found outside the ghetto after that date would be shot on the spot,” he said.

The border of the ghetto included watch towers every 200 feet equipped with search lights and manned by soldiers with machine guns. Before the gates swung shut, Eisenbach’s sister fled with some friends to the Russian part of Poland.

His mother had died of rheumatic fever a year before the war. He and his father, brothers and extended family went into the ghetto. There was no radio, no newspapers, no way to communicate with the outside world. They knew nothing of what was happening.

“They gave us a starvation diet,” he said. “People were dropping dead in the streets of the ghetto.”

A typhus epidemic broke out and one day Henry got sick. He went to one of the two hospitals in the ghetto staffed by Jewish doctors. A day later the Nazis took all the patients from both hospitals and stacked them high in the back of cattle trucks.

“They transported them directly to the gas chambers at Auschwitz,” he said.

His father got a deportation order. Eisenbach said he later found a survivor who was with his father and knew how he had died. “They had them carry heavy rocks from place to place, useless work on a starvation diet,” he said.

More deportation orders came and trains full of Jews left the ghetto. At first no one knew where they were going, but soon the train employees started whispering about the people who went into the camps and never came out. “They could smell the burning flesh in the air,” he said.

Then Eisenbach’s deportation order came. Alone with his younger brother Sam, Eisenbach refused to go. “We already knew what was going on,” he said. “That was a death sentence.”

The two boys went into hiding, but after a month they were discovered. Sam did not have a deportation order, but he refused to leave his older brother.

“I’m going with you,” Sam said to Eisenbach. “No matter where you go, I go.”

The two were loaded into cattle cars and spent three days and three nights on the train. There wasn’t even enough room to turn around.

Eisenbach assumed they would go to Auschwitz, but they were sent to another camp where the Jews were forced to work in a munitions factory that was essential to the German war effort. Both brothers survived and it was there that Eisenbach met his future wife, Irene.

On one January day in 1945, everything changed. “All of the sudden the Nazi guards with the machine guns disappeared from the guard towers,” he said. “The next morning we woke up free.”

After the war there was still a lot of antisemitism in Poland, and Eisenbach and his wife left, smuggled out through Czechoslovakia. His brother Sam stayed behind and rose to a high rank in the Polish army and changed his name to hide his Jewish ancestry. But two years after the war ended he was shot in the head by someone who hated Jews, Eisenbach said.

He learned that his sister had died in another Jewish ghetto. “One day the Nazis came with machine guns and in three days they killed all 110,000 Jews,” he said.

Only a distant cousin managed to survive.

After four years in Frankfurt to study dentistry, he and his wife came to the United States. “That was the best move we ever made,” he said.

The couple spent nearly two decades in Iowa raising three sons before moving to southern California, where Eisenbach still lives today.

In addition to his story of survival, Eisenbach likes to point to stories of heroism found even in the darkest days. Denmark shipped all their Jewish citizens to Sweden to save their lives. Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish ambassador to Hungary, saved thousands of Jews by issuing them Swedish passports.

“There were many humanitarian stories that have to be told, not only the stories of cruelty,” he said.

His wife died three years ago and now Eisenbach dedicates himself to giving speeches about the Holocaust. He does not want future generations to have to experience what he did under the Nazi regime.

“The reason I do that is because it is so important the story of the Holocuast be told and retold,” he said. “If we forget it, we contribute to its repetition.”

Genocide still exists today, Eisenbach said, and must be stopped.

“Good people of goodwill around the entire world are against genocide,” he said. “We have to work hard to prevent them and eliminate them.”