My Voice: Jackie Young: Lost and waiting to be found

Jackie Young was born in 1941 in Austria. He was a child survivor of Theresienstadt concentration camp where he spent two years and eight months before liberation by the Soviet Army in May 1945. He came to England at nearly four years old and was adopted by a loving couple, the Janofskys, who told him nothing about his background.

Jackie learned he was adopted at age nine when a boy at school told him and he started to understand why he always felt different from everyone else. Jackie’s life since has been a 70 year-long quest to find out the truth.

Bit by bit, Jackie has uncovered the missing pieces of his background. He learned his mother was killed at 32 at Maly Trostenets near Minsk, most likely shot by the Nazis along with a further estimated 200,000 Jews. He also feared his father was a Nazi as his mother was unmarried, he went on the TV show ‘DNA Family Secrets’ in 2022 to discover the truth.

Now a retired London taxi driver, Jackie has been married to the love of his life Lita for 60 years and has many treasures now – their two daughters and three grandchildren.

Jackie's book is part of the My Voice book collection, a stand-alone project of The Fed, the leading Jewish social care charity in Manchester, dedicated to preserving the life stories of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. The oral history, which is recorded and transcribed, captures their entire lives from before, during and after the war years. The books are written in the words of the survivor so that future generations can always hear their voice. The My Voice book collection is a valuable resource for Holocaust awareness and education.