My interview with Jackie Young, a Holocaust survivor:
Jackie Young (born Jona Spiegel) was born in December 1941 in Vienna, Austria, but raised by adoptive parents in England. He talks about slowly learning about his own past, which his adoptive parents had kept from him despite his own faint memories and hints mentioned by relatives.
Young, adopted by a Jewish couple from North London, never spoke about his past. But, when he was nine, he discovered he was adopted. It did not matter until, when he was a teenager, his grandmother told him he was born in Austria.
Young miraculously survived as an orphaned infant for two years and eight months at the Terezin (Theresienstadt) camp ghetto in Czechoslovakia. The Nazis deported him when he was an infant to Maly Trostinec, near Minsk, where his mother, Elsa Spiegel, was deported and murdered.
Elsa Spiegel handed her baby, named Yona Jakob Spiegel, born at the Rothschild-Spital (Jewish hospital) on December 18, 1941, to an orphanage before her deportation. Young found two accounts of this, one saying he was three and a half months old and another saying he was five and a half months old.
Young was deported to Terezin in September 1942 and was interned there between the ages of nine months and three and a half years. He has been able to establish that he was the sole survivor among the 15 children without parents who were together with him on the same transport to the camp. He survived the camp. After the war, and sent to the UK as part of the Windermere children.
After a while, he was in the care of a young family who adopted him when he was nine years old.
Taken from his memoirs, Lost and Waiting to be Found:
“I gradually began to understand what being adopted meant, and it now became clear to me why I had always had a feeling of being different from other children. I could remember back to when I was five years old, playing with lots of boys and girls, and one day some of us were ushered forward to meet two people—a young man and a woman. They wanted to take us out for a ride in the country. One day I was to go alone with these people to stay with them for a few days, and obviously, that visit was to lead to my being adopted.
Every so often, I tried to question my parents where was I born, and where were my real parents. But they usually fobbed me off with the statement that they loved me very much, and that was all that mattered. In retrospect, my adopted parents were behaving protectively, they did not want me to be hurt, but I started to become increasingly frustrated. I noticed that at school—if I were naughty, the teachers would tell me off in the nicest possible way and even apologise for hitting me. This seemed very strange, and I quickly began to realize that I possessed a lever which enabled me to get my own way with my parents, providing I didn’t ask questions. Looking back I can see that I was thoroughly spoilt.”
Below is the interview with him.
Sources
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/jackie-young-yom-hashoah
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn69538
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/28/a1955928.shtml
History of Sorts 
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