“All that I remember of that Nazi time is our feeling of fear and being desperate. … Every time a bell was ringing, we thought: ‘This is it! They are coming to take us to the Ka Zet!’ [concentration camp],” reads Ilse Jacobson’s biography.
Then Ilse’s father lost his right to practice medicine in Berlin. The Jacobsons fled Germany in 1939, but the United States turned their ship filled with refugees away. After settling in Havana, Cuba for 20 months, they made their way to New York. On New Year’s Eve they took a bus to Chicago, where her father had to repeat his entire medical training in order to practice. He began his residency in Oak Park Hospital, where the family remained.
Ilse Jacobson was born on Sept. 3, 1920 to Dr. Arthur and Elisabeth Jacobson. She died on July 18, 2007. For the past 16 years she has lived in her southwest corner apartment at the Oak Park Arms.
Through the years, Jacobson enjoyed sharing her experiences during the war because she said she wanted to keep the past alive.
In 1994, she did a 2 1/2-hour video interview on her experiences for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, an oral history project funded by Steven Spielberg. She often shared that video with organizations and students studying the Holocaust.
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Jacobson donated some of her father’s medical documents to Dr. Rebecca Schwoch, an investigator for the Medical History Society. She also donated childhood keepsakes and original documents from her Bat Mitzvah to the Jewish Museum of Berlin. She and a friend attended the museum’s opening in Sept. 2001.
At heart though, Jacobson was a teacher. Her mother was a language teacher, and Jacobson followed in her footsteps, receiving a teaching certificate and a degree in education in 1949. She became director of the West Suburban Temple Nursery School. In 1960 she graduated with a master’s in guidance from Northwestern University.
Jacobson was one of the first in the field to work with mentally challenged students as a special education pre-school teacher in LaGrange School District 102. She institutionalized the special education curriculum there and wrote a book on it.
Through Triton College, she taught night German classes for adults at Oak Park and River Forest High School until shortly after 2000. At the Senior Citizens Center at the Oak Park Arms she taught Spanish from 1970 to 2001, and German from 1988 until recently, along with some fundamental French. In addition, Jacobson was always tutoring random people at the dining room table in her apartment.
Many of her students became her best friends throughout the years.
Karen Glass was Jacobson’s German student at the high school. When she and her husband were planning a trip to Germany, Jacobson made Glass and her husband traveling guides. When any other student was planning to travel, she held the same class again just for them.
The Glasses sent Jacobson postcards in German while on their trip. When they returned, Jacobson gave them back their postcards with grammar corrections in red pen.
“She was always teaching,” Glass said.
Jacobson spent hours preparing for lessons. She made flash cards, printed handouts and copied anything else to help her students.
Pat Koko, executive director of the Senior Center said Jacobson would regularly sneak in to use the copier, and became known as the “ghost” copier. “She made virtually no noise. [If it weren’t] for the copier, we would not have realized she was there,” Koko said. She always brought paper to replace what she used, she added.
“She was always learning, exploring new avenues,” Glass recalled. Her new computer and the Internet was the highlight of her later life. She became well acquainted with Google on her own, and would look up information on anything from plants to medicine to languages, Glass said. Jacobson received the word of the day on her computer in Spanish and German and shared them in class.
At the Arms, Jacobson attended Tai Chi classes. There she learned of Chinese wolfberries that she was told were healthy. After looking them up on the Internet, “she’d put them on her cakes, cook them up in foods, and put them with other fruit,” Glass said. “She would have these new things, get on the Internet and find out all this info about it, print it out, and share it with everyone,” Glass said.
Jacobson got numerous copies of German and English newspapers, magazines, and even talking magazines when her eyesight was poor. A German friend, who was a flight attendant, brought and sent her papers often. Once in a while he e-mailed her from the plane and wrote that he was 37,000 feet over Siberia where it was snowing because Jacobson would get such a kick out of it.
“She would have this big smile and her eyes would get big. She was just so proud she could learn that,” Glass said.
“Right up to the end she was in a continuous state of excitement about her newest discoveries on the Internet, papers, and correspondence with her friends around the world. She was a truly delightful person, and I will never forget her,” said Frederick Fremont who was Jacobson’s tutored in German for about 10 years.
Glass said she was the kind of person whom you met once, and she became your friend forever. “She’s got people all over the world who are her friends-a student in British Columbia, students and friends in Germany-she’s got ’em everywhere. They all e-mail her,” Glass said.
She meet a resident at the Arms who spoke German and noticed that she couldn’t hear or see well. Jacobson would rewrite the day’s activities in big letters and slip it under her door every morning.
“She’d always be thinking of somebody else,” Judy Ekberg, a friend and student, said.
One of Jacobson’s favorite hobbies was growing plants. Her apartment was bursting with green leaves from every windowsill, across the floor and on her bookcases. She grew tomato plants on the solarium at the Oak Park Arms, and the fruit would often go missing. Glass said she would yell, “These old people are taking my tomatoes!”
Jacobson had a collection of plant clippings and dying flowers covered in plastic bags on top of a shelf that she called “intensive care.”
“She had a very green thumb. She could grow anything,” Glass said.
One of her best friends, Julie Madden, was the marketing director at the Oak Park Arms and also loved plants. “It was an immediate bond,” Madden said. She convinced Jacobson to enter her plants in a flower show, and Jacobson won three ribbons for her blooming euphorbia as well as two other plants. “She was so proud,” Madden recalled, saying that Jacobson never removed the ribbons.
“She had a way of people gravitating towards her,” Madden said.
“The biggest impact she had on me was her spirit-her resilience to be able to keep bouncing back after each hard knock of life,” Madden said. “She took advantage of every opportunity and lived every moment. She was all she could be up to the end of her life.”