Jacobson, Louise (1924–1943)

French correspondent whose Lettres de Louise Jacobson was adapted for the theater. Born in Paris, France, on December 24, 1924; died in Auschwitz in 1943; daughter ofOlga Jacobson (d. 1943).

Louise Jacobson was born in Paris on December 24, 1924. In 1942, as a 17-year-old, she was studying for her baccalaureate exam at the Hélène Boucher lycée in Vincennes, during the German Occupation of France. When orders went out from the German high command for Jews to wear the yellow star, Jacobson defied the edict. On September 1, 1942, she was arrested as a political prisoner and taken to the Parisian prison, Fresnes. There, while she was interned for around two months, she wrote often to schoolfriends in a tiny script on hard-to-obtain paper. In her first letter, she wrote: "(I'm going to tell you something that will make you blush) I'm the only virgin here and the only political prisoner (!!!) The others are in for theft, prostitution, vagrancy."

Jacobson was moved to Drancy where she spent her 18th birthday (1942). She wrote her sister Nadia : "The life I'm living tempers me and forces me to manage on my own. Despite a few inconveniences all will not have been lost and I will have learned certain things." Friends sent her photos of her family and books for which she was extremely thankful.

Jacobson and the other young prisoners of Drancy determined to eradicate the scene around them by exploring the intellect. "I've finished The Physiology of Instinct and Intelligence," she wrote Nadia. "I read it with Mallina and we both memorized the sections on the brain, which was a little tricky." On February 13, 1943, Louise Jacobson was deported to Auschwitz on French convoy 48 which included 1,000 Jews of French birth, 153 of them children. Her mother would follow on French convoy 62. There, both perished, though Nadia escaped deportation and survived the war. Like Anne Frank , Louise Jacobson's legacy was an articulate record of her thoughts and experiences, which was later published by Serge Klarsfeld in France in 1989 as Lettres de Louise Jacobson and adapted for the theater.