It was a beautiful winter’s night in early 1944 when Jack (then Icek) Nierob, 19, left his night-shift job in the steam room of Skarzysko’s Camp C to use the latrine, an outdoor shack near the labor camp’s barbed-wire fence. On his way back, a Ukrainian guard shouted for him to halt and accused him of trying to run away. He hit Jack with his gun, stuck the gun’s cleaning rod up his nose and ordered him to return to the fence. “You can shoot me here,” Jack said, refusing to move. Instead, the guard smacked him so hard across the head with his gun that Jack fainted, falling headfirst into the snow. When he awoke, the guard was gone, and he returned to work. Later, as daylight broke, Jack saw the guard enter the steam room and he began shaking. The guard just smiled at him. “You’re lucky I didn’t kill you,” he said.
Jack was born in Plock, Poland, on Jan. 1, 1925, to Abraham and Regina Nierob. He and his twin sister, Teresa, were the fourth and fifth of eight siblings; Teresa died when she was just 1.
Abraham was a tailor, and the family, which was quite poor, lived in a two-bedroom apartment, along with Jack’s very devout maternal grandmother, Fajga Pencherek.
Jack attended a public school for Jewish students. But more than academics, he adored sports, particularly soccer.
When Jack was 12, his mother died. He still remembers lying on her breast while she scratched his head. “I never could forget that feeling,” he said. A year later, in 1938, his father remarried.
In early September 1939, when Germany attacked Poland, most of Plock’s 10,000 Jews fled the city. Jack and his family walked to Gombim, his stepmother’s hometown, a 12-mile trek through the forest. There, the family, now numbering 11, including Jack’s brother-in-law and baby niece, lived in one small room.
About a week later, after the Luftwaffe bombed Gombim, Jack bicycled back to Plock to get food for the family. On his return trip, the Polish military stopped him, charging him with being a German spy. Jack cried as they placed him against a tree, preparing to shoot him. Finally, after proving to the soldiers that he had been circumcised, they released him.
After a month, the family returned to Plock. The Germans controlled the city, confiscating Jewish businesses and valuables and terrorizing Jewish residents on a daily basis with roundups, torture and even death, especially for the sick and elderly. A ghetto was established.
Work became mandatory for men and women. Although Jack was too young to be required to work, he often substituted for his father.
On one work detail, German soldiers ordered Jack and three others to dig graves, “their own graves,” they said. When the prisoners finished digging, they were told to walk up a nearby hill where they watched the soldiers bring out two political prisoners and formally execute them. The Jewish prisoners were then called back to bury them.
On March 1, 1941, in the second and last deportation from Plock, Jack’s family and about 3,000 other Jews were lined up and loaded onto trucks. Jack, then 16, was in charge of helping his grandmother, Fajga, who was 93 but who disguised her age by wearing a wig over her gray hair.
The group arrived at Dzialdowo, a transit camp. As Jack held on to his grandmother, a German soldier wielding a bullwhip tipped with lead balls began striking her. Fajga, who talked to God every day, looked up at the sky with an angry face. She then put her finger in her mouth, as if regretting having said something disrespectful.
After three days, the prisoners were transferred to Bodzentyn, where they lived in an open ghetto with the village’s small and indigent Chasidic population. Again, Jack’s family shared one room.
Food was scarce. To help feed his family, Jack found work living on a Polish farm, taking care of the cows. But when the illiterate farmers suspected he was Jewish, because he was reading the newspapers to them, Jack bolted and returned to Bodzentyn.
Then one night in June or July 1941, Polish police who were working for the Germans entered the Nierobs’ room. “You’re coming with us,” they ordered Jack and his brother-in-law, Moshe Blumert. They were placed in an open truck and driven to Skaryzsko, though Moshe, who had a wife and child, bribed his way back to Bodzentyn.
Jack and the other prisoners lived in preliminary barracks, working long days cutting down trees for the permanent barracks, which were built in three separate factory camps run by HASAG, a German company. Camps A and B produced ammunition. Camp C manufactured ammunition powder, which required prisoners to work with a toxic powder that usually killed them within three months.
After the permanent barracks were built, Jack was sent to Camp C. But he was assigned to assist two Polish plumbers, digging ditches and carrying their tools and supplies.
After working with the plumbers for more than two years, Jack was moved to the steam plant, to shovel coal into the three furnaces.
Around Aug. 1, 1944, the camp was evacuated. Jack’s group was sent by cattle car to Sulejow, a labor camp in central Poland, where they dug trenches for fortification against the approaching Russian tanks.
Conditions were terrible, with little water and heavy dust, and Jack didn’t know if he could survive. One night, he sneaked into a nearby camp for Christian Poles. He fit in seamlessly with his blond hair and fluent Polish, working with them and fortifying himself with rations of soup and bread. But after three days of listening to their anti-Semitic rants and delight in the torture and murder of Jews, he returned to his Jewish barracks, convinced it would be better to die there.
Three days later, in late December 1944, Jack, along with other prisoners, was relocated to Czestochowa, where HASAG operated two labor camps. He repaired damaged tanks and other machinery.
Then, on Jan. 17, 1945, as the Russian army advanced, thousands of Czestochowa prisoners were loaded into cattle cars and taken to concentration camps.
Jack’s group arrived at Buchenwald, where he was processed and assigned to a barracks. During the day, he and other prisoners were taken into the nearby city of Weimar, where they cleaned up debris caused by Allied bombing.
On the morning of April 11, 1945, Jack watched as German SS guards fled from their posts in the watchtowers. Later that afternoon, American troops liberated the camp. Jack was 20.
Jack remained in Buchenwald for about 10 days as relief organizations arrived. He then moved to Weimar, where he met Sidney Berger, an American soldier from New York. Jack told Sidney about his mother’s brother, Abraham Pencherek, who was a furrier in New York. Sidney’s father was also a furrier, and Sidney promised to write him.
Jack moved to Frankfurt and then to the nearby Zeilsheim displaced persons camp.
In 1946, Jack met a friend from Plock who informed him that the entire Nierob family had perished in Treblinka. He also received news that Sidney’s father had located his uncle, who was sending him visa papers.
Finally, in April 1949, Jack boarded the hospital ship Mercy in Bremerhaven and sailed to Boston. He traveled by train to New York, where he lived with an aunt.
Jack moved to Los Angeles in early 1951. There, he met Henrietta (Kate) Hirshfield, a widow with a 3-year-old daughter, and they married on Feb. 6, 1954. Their daughter, Renee, was born in January 1956, and son Alan in June 1957.
In 1959, after apprenticing for four years at a plumbing company and earning his contractor’s license, Jack opened his own business, Jack Nierob Plumbing.
Kate died on Jan. 1, 2003. Less than three years later, on Oct. 23, 2005, Renee was murdered. Jack retired in 2008.
Now almost 90, Jack walks every day. He takes great joy in his family, including five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
“What saved me?” Jack still wonders. “Is it luck, destiny or faith?” He has asked these questions of rabbis, priests and other educated people over the years. “Nobody can give an answer,” he said.
As a mother of two sons, a Jewish educator, a writer and a friend, Chava Gal-Or thrives on the connections she makes with all living creatures, as well as through her weaving of words. Her workshops and writing both focus on embracing a life filled with conscious living, sustainability, simplicity, and on a sacred space within Judaism.