Jacob Hiegentlich was born on 30 April 1907 in Roermond. His parents - wholesaler in confection goods Sallie Hiegentlich and his mother Rosalie Egger, deceased in 1927 - had five children. Four of them would, like their father, not survive the war.
Jacob Hiegentlich grew up in catholic Roermond in, as he once himself described it, "a confusing mixture of Roman-Catholic and Jewish culture". He vis…