White County’s Living History: A miracle of faith

“The fact that I’m sitting here talking to you today is a miracle,” says Lucy Jacob.

She was born Ludmila Dubovsky on May 5, 1944, in a Nazi labor camp in Poland.

Her conception, birth, and early childhood, against all odds, took place amidst the atrocities of the deadliest theater of war in history, during the height of the Holocaust.

By her 16th birthday party, in 1960, she was a typical American teenager in Lincoln, Neb., who wanted to listen to the Everly Brothers instead of her father’s Russian polkas, to Elvis instead of her mother’s “war stories.”

But at age 64, Lucy realizes that her parents’ struggles, their sacrifices – and their ultimate survival – are testaments to freedom, faith, and the strength of the human spirit.

Her parents, both originally from the Eastern European country of Belarus, met during the summer of 1943, after tragic circumstances found them both prisoners of war in a Nazi labor camp in Poland, near the border of their home country.

In the chaotic place and times of the Eastern Front of World War II, while the German Reich and the Soviet Union desecrated central and Eastern Europe, both had lost their spouse.

Both had lost their children.

Both had lost their country.

But neither had lost hope.

“My mother appeared in this camp,” Lucy said. “My father learned she was a fellow country person and he told her, ‘We need to be together, and somehow we need to get out of this.'”

Prior to the war, and prior to meeting each other, Lucy’s mother had been a dental surgeon, her father a math teacher.

Both raised Catholic, they had grown up in Belarus prior to World War II, under the communist rule of the Soviet Union, during a time when their families prayed secretly, when villagers’ livestock was taken from them and placed in community farms.

“They would go to the individual farms and take their cows, pigs, chickens,” she says of the Soviet soldiers. “It was their livelihood, their cheese, milk, butter, eggs.

“The women would go and steal their cows back at night – they knew which ones were their cows – and then the soldiers would come and take the cows back and tell them, ‘if you take your cow, we’re going to come and take your husband and you’ll never see him again.’ It was a way to put fear into people.

“They have been under somebody’s thumb for centuries and centuries,” Lucy says of the Belorussians.

Prior to the 1917 Russian Revolution, Belorussia fell under the reign of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Following the abdication and execution of the tsar and his family, the Romanovs, Vladimir Lenin gained control of what would become the Soviet Union, and Belorussia became the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.

“My father used to say, ‘The czar wasn’t the greatest, but at least we could have our own cow,'” Lucy says.

Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin gradually consolidated power and became dictator of the Soviet Union.

It was during this era, the mid 1930s, when Lucy’s parents, Bronislav and Maria, who did not yet know each other, began the separate journeys that led to their fateful union.

Lucy’s father taught sixth-grade math in a school where Stalin’s portrait hung in every room, during a time when Bronislav refused to join the communist party.

“Somebody defaced one of the pictures,” Lucy says. “My father was blamed for it, and he was arrested. They interrogated him for 10 days trying to get him, through sleep deprivation, to sign a confession.”

He wouldn’t sign a confession, nor would he join the communist party – nor take the bait of a revolver left on a desk within his reach – so he was exiled, put on a train and sent more than 700 miles away to work long hours and hard labor in a brick factory. A year later, his wife and their two children were allowed to join him.

He was soon drafted into the Russian army and sent to Spaask, on the Sea of Japan, where he spent three months training as a surveyor. In March of 1941, after returning and serving on the front lines of the European theater of World War II, he was captured by the Germans. He never saw his wife and children again.

“He had to walk 60 miles, with no food, no water,” Lucy says. “The women would put water out for the soldiers and the Nazis would kick the buckets over.

“He was in prison for quite a while, in a cell with 15 men. They all had lice. There was only a bucket to urinate and eliminate in. They slept on the floor, and if one man turned, everyone had to turn. It was that cramped.

“My father was a wonderful baritone, and he used to sing old Russian folk songs,” Lucy says. “The commander heard him singing and asked the guards, ‘Who’s singing?’ The guards told him it was ‘one of those Russians.’

“The German commander loved Russian music, and he told my father, ‘I’ll give you some food if you’ll come sing and translate for me.’

“There was this mass of people from all of these different countries, and my father spoke Russian, German, Polish, Belorussian, Czechoslovakian and Ukrainian.

“Music was something that saved my father’s life, music and the fact that he was bilingual. I think it was God’s way of saving my father.

“Music is a huge part of my life,” Lucy says. “During hard times, I sit at the piano and pound out a song and cry. It gives me solace.

Lucy’s mother, Maria, was educated in Minsk as a dental surgeon. She married in 1937 and worked in a clinic. Then the war broke out and she was drafted into the Russian Army, as was her husband.

In 1939, two hours late reporting for duty because he was telling his pregnant wife goodbye, her husband was arrested for being late and was sent to Siberia.

“She never saw him again,” Lucy says.

“Siberia covers a large part of Russia. The winters are very cold, and they did very long, hard labor in the camps,” she said. “Most people sent to Siberia died there. If they didn’t die, they either came back insane or very, very ill.”

In December 1939, while World War II raged around her, Lucy’s mother gave birth to a son in a hospital in the Minsk area of Belarus.

“The hospital was bombed as she was giving birth,” Lucy says. “They lost electricity, and they couldn’t keep the baby warm. He got pneumonia and died.

“At that point, my mother wanted to die. She felt absolutely, totally hopeless. She had lost her husband. She had lost her child.

“She went to her father, and he told her, ‘You cannot give up hope. No matter how bad things get, God is still in control.’

“His faith was still there. They never stopped praying. God was still central in their lives.

“He told her not to lose hope. That was the only thing left, hope.”

After her husband’s exile and her newborn son’s death, Maria returned to duty with the Russian army. In 1943, she was captured by the Germans and taken to the same Nazi labor camp where Bronislav was being fed just enough to stay alive in exchange for his singing and translating.

“The camp they were in wasn’t far from the camp were the Jews were held,” Lucy says. “They could smell the incinerators when they were burning bodies.”

Unable to officially marry in the Nazi labor camp, Maria and Bronislav vowed upon their own common law marriage. Shortly after Lucy’s birth, the Russian army came into the labor camp, and they were released.

“They hid and lived in the woods,” Lucy says. “They hid from the Russians and the Germans both. At this point, they had no country. The Russians now considered my father a traitor because he had ‘worked’ for the Germans.

“There were about 16 people living together in the woods,” she says.

“They lived on berries, mushrooms, roots. My mother said she stole two eggs one time and split them between 16 people.

“They lived in the woods for three months during the summer of 1944 in western Poland.

“They got hold of a wagon, and they got hold of a horse. They figured their best chance was to get to Berlin, so they headed west by the sun.”

At one point, Lucy says, both of her parents thought the other had put baby Lucy in the wagon, only to realize in a panic that she had been left behind about 30 minutes earlier.

“They had to turn around and go back,” Lucy says. “I was still lying in the woods.”

Sometime during this chaotic time, Lucy says, her parents were on a train with other prisoners being transported.

She and her mother were in one car with women and children, her father in another car with men.

“The train was being attacked,” Lucy says. “The doors were locked from the outside. My mother took her boots off and broke out a window. She wrapped me in a blanket and tied her belt around me. The train was moving very slowly by that point, so she used the belt to lower me so I didn’t fall too far, and she threw me out the window.

“She jumped out the window, ran back, picked me up, and ran into the woods.

When Maria looked back at the train, it was burning.

Lucy’s father and the men in his car had broken out a window also, and the reunited family finally made it to Berlin in November 1944, when Lucy was six months old.

In Berlin, they pretended to be German. Bronislav spoke German. Maria did not speak.

“Her accent would have given her away,” Lucy says.

They lived in bombed out buildings and ran for the subway when the bomb sirens went off.

“When the sirens would go off, my mother would tie me to her waist and run,” Lucy says.

“One day there had been six raids. My mother was so tired. She got to the subway, and there was no Lucy. She had lost me between the bombed building and the subway. ”

Frantic and crying, Maria tried to leave the subway to go back for Lucy, but the soldiers, who said the baby had most likely been trampled, wouldn’t let her leave.

“Then the door opened and a German soldier walked in. He was carrying me. Mother knew at that moment that she was going to survive the war.”

The soldier had found Lucy in a three-foot snow bank after hearing her crying, cold and wet, but alive.

Maria’s faith did not fail her. The war did end, and she and her second family did survive.

They found an abandoned home in the Alps in southern Germany and they made their plan.

“When the war ended, all of the refugees were being moved out of Berlin,” she says. “They came looking for the Russians. They were going to send them back to be repatriated.” But the Polish, she says, they left alone.

So they became Polish.

They changed their names and, tutored by a Polish friend, they learned about a village in Poland: the names of the schools, the layout of the village.

“They made fake birth certificates and made seals out of cheese,” Lucy says.

They ended up in a camp outside of Munich with 5,000 other refugees. It is there that Lucy’s earliest memories begin.

“They found out my mother was a dentist and asked her if she would like some equipment. They tested her knowledge, and they got her a drill and chair and all she needed to do dental work. She taught my dad how to make false teeth.

“I would sit and watch her,” Lucy says.

“She would stick one knee on somebody’s lap and be yanking that tooth out. There was no Novocain, and people would be screaming.

“If you think about all she had to deal with: these people had had no medical or dental care for years. ”

Meanwhile, Lucy had not learned to walk. She cried all of the time, and Maria and Bronislav learned that she had a dislocated hip.

“I don’t know if it happened when I was thrown off the train, dropped in the snow bank, or whether it happened during childbirth,” she says.

The surgeries began at age 4, and she spent three years in and out of hospitals, in body casts and braces. “They were told it was possible I might not survive, but they took a chance and trusted God.” Lucy survived and learned to walk.

In 1950, her brother was born. In December of 1951, after years of applying for and being denied immigration, the family made the two-week trip across the Atlantic and arrived safely in New York City just days before Christmas.

Their yearning for countryside, for a garden, led them to Nebraska, where her father found work with a railroad and her mother did odd jobs.

“My father didn’t care that he had to go into a freight car and strip it and sand it in the 105-degree heat because he knew that when he walked out of there he could speak his mind. He could read the bible.

“He knew how important freedom was because he had it taken away.”

 

By Sue Erb

Nov 23, 2008

*Article written by Sue and printed in the Herald Journal Newspaper