Birnbaum

Jacob Birnbaum and his family moved to Dombrowa when he was in his early teens.
He worked as an apprentice to a dentist.

Taken from his family, 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."

Jacob Birnbaum survived three years, in six concentration camps.

Jacob Birnbaum wrote about his experiences in the 1995 book "I Kept My Promise."

Jacob Birnbaum was once so ill his captors thought he was dead.
He was saved at the last moment, when a doctor examining corpses noticed that he 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.

One day, Jacob Birnbaum 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.

Jacob and Mira Birnbaum married a few years after they met while living side-by-side in women's and men's sections of the Langenbielau camp.

Jacob and Mira Birnbaum moved to Boston and lived in Dorchester, Roxbury, and Brookline, before settling in Newton in 1955.