Emil Jacoby was born in a pious family in Terebla in Subcarpathian Russia in 1923 and grew up in the town of Buštino.
After the occupation of Subcarpathian Rus by Hungary in November 1938, he sought employment in Brno, from where he was deported back to Hungary by the Gestapo after the Protectorate was established. He did not stay at home for long, as there was no money to bribe the police, who regularly tried to deport him as a foreigner. He tried his luck in Budapest. In the meantime, Hungary, as an ally of the Nazis, declared war on the Soviet Union, and his father was deported by the Hungarian authorities to what is now Ukraine, where he was murdered in Kamenets Podolski in August 1941, together with about 20,000 other Jews.
In Budapest, Emil earned his living as a shoeshine boy, waiter, and room painter. When Germany occupied Hungary in 1944 and the Hungarian government they installed began deporting Jews, Emil enrolled in a forced labor camp, a branch of Mauthausen, which, to his great fortune, was run by elderly German soldiers, not the SS. He survived the death march to Mauthausen at the end of the war.
After the liberation he returned to Czechoslovakia, lived in Prague, then worked in a rubber factory in Náchod. When war broke out in the newly established Israel, he volunteered for the Israeli army, settling in Tel Aviv. After two more wars in which he fought, he left for the USA in the late 1970s at the invitation of a distant cousin.
The interview was filmed on 18 December 1995 in Staten Island, New York, USA.