Send Page to a Friend Jacob Birnbaum, 85; his book kept Holocaust memories alive   By Bryan Marquard The Boston Globe   May 9, 2007  Removed from his family in Poland on his 20th birthday and imprisoned in a labor camp during World War II, Jacob Birnbaum bribed a guard so he could send messages home and receive replies. In their last letter, his parents wrote that they might be sent to the death camp at Auschwitz. "We don't know who is going to survive, but you may be the only one from our family to come out of this," his father wrote. "If you do survive, son, never let the world forget what they did to us." Over the next three years, Mr. Birnbaum survived six concentration camps. He wrote about his experiences in the 1995 book "I Kept My Promise." Mr. Birnbaum, who spent much of the past four decades sustaining the memory of the Holocaust, died Monday in Palisades, N.Y., where he had moved in 2004 to live closer to his daughter. He was 85 and had lived for 50 years in Newton, where he was a dental technician. After he was liberated, Mr. Birnbaum was hesitant to discuss the horrors he had endured. "For 20 years I kept a voluntary moratorium on talking about the Holocaust. Both my parents and my sister were killed and I told my children about it so their memories would be preserved, but I never spoke about the Holocaust in public," he told the Globe in 1980. "Something bothered me finally. It was like it never happened . . . so many people seemed to regard it as an unimportant event. I felt an obligation to tell my story, both to study more about what happened and to put the links together with others." In a blurb for "I Kept My Promise," Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel said that "Jacob Birnbaum's autobiography is a survivor's important testimony. Read it. Make your friends read it. Written with pain and courage, it is his personal way of keeping his 'promise' to the victims who perished in Hitler's nightmarish death-camps." Mr. Birnbaum's story began in Piotrkow, a town southwest of Warsaw, where he was born and lived until his family moved to Dombrowa when he was in his early teens. He worked as an apprentice to a dentist. He was taken from his parents and sister on April 15, 1942. Using his wits, Mr. Birnbaum helped himself and others survive in camp after camp. At key moments he traded the few dental tools he had brought along for food, and he persuaded others to share their knowledge in discussion groups. "In the camps he said, 'One person is a mathematician, one person is a lawyer, one person is a dentist. We'll go around and everyone will talk about what they know,' " said Mr. Birnbaum's son Herbert of Newton. "In the middle of everything he organized this series, and it was a way to keep their humanity alive." At times Mr. Birnbaum had to concentrate on simply staying alive. Once he was so ill his captors thought he was dead. He was saved at the last moment, his son said, when a doctor examining corpses noticed that Mr. Birnbaum was still breathing. Another time, he was accused of sabotage and marked for execution, but the Soviet Army arrived at the labor camp before he could be hanged. Moved by the stories he heard from others at the camps, he wrote a poem in December 1943 called "Sen Nocy Lagrowej," or "The Dream of a Midwinter's Camp Night," which insisted on hope rising from the horrors. At my feet the torn fragments of barbed wire are strewn, Yellow badges fly around me -- We'll live again soon. We'll get back what they took. Yes, it will be all returned. The cherished sense of the word "Freedom" will be relearned. One day he looked through the barbed wire at the women's camp next door and saw two women begin to dance and sing when their guards had stepped out of sight. He fell in love with one of the women, who were sisters, and promised to find her. After the war ended, he found Mira Laudon and they married on Aug. 19, 1945. In the late 1940s, he was a controller for a town in Poland. He completed a master's degree in dental technology and immigrated to Boston. He quickly learned English and practiced dental technology in Boston, where he owned Progressive Dental Laboratory and was president of the state's association for dental laboratories. When his two sons, Nathan and Herbert, became dentists, he moved his work to Chestnut Hill and stayed with them until retiring about a decade ago. Beginning in the late 1960s, Mr. Birnbaum started working with Holocaust remembrance organizations and speaking to school classes. "It was partly because he heard that there were professors who were saying the Holocaust never occurred," Herbert Birnbaum said. "He was asked to speak at a local synagogue, and he grudgingly accepted because he said, 'I've got to tell the story if there are people saying it never happened.' " Mr. Birnbaum helped found the New England Holocaust Memorial and the US Holocaust Museum, Herbert Birnbaum said, and led remembrance and memorial committees for the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston and for Congregation Mishkan Tefila and Congregation Beth El-Atereth Israel, both in Newton. After having kept quiet about the Holocaust for those 20 years, he used his eloquent survivor's voice to ensure that others would not forget. "Today, we remember the 100,000 Jewish children deported from Warsaw to the death camps," he said in April 1993, speaking to a crowd of nearly 1,000 at Faneuil Hall. "There will be no cemeteries where we can bow our heads for them or lay a wreath, no graves where we can say Kaddish. The earth is soaked with their blood, permeated by their memories. Their destinies are rooted in ours." In addition to his wife, Mira, and his sons Nathan and Herbert, both of Newton, Mr. Birnbaum leaves a daughter, Ruth Pernick of Nanuet, N.Y.; five grandsons and five granddaughters. A service will be held at 10 a.m. today -- the 62nd anniversary of his liberation from the labor camps -- in Congregation Beth El-Atereth Israel. Burial will be in Mishkan Tefila Memorial Park in West Roxbury.