Veniamin Yakobson was born in the late 1880s. There is no biographical data about where he was born and grew up, but we do know that, in the 1920s, he lived in the town of Odoyev (in Tula Oblast), where he was a well-known pharmacist. His pharmacy was located on the first floor of the town's central building, while his family lived on the second floor. Yakobson was twice subjected to repression during the Soviet period, but the exact circumstances are unknown.
Following the Nazi invasion of the USSR in late June 1941, Veniamin Yakobson was drafted into the Red Army, where he served as chief pharmacist in a rifle regiment.
As early as August 1941, Veniamin Yakobson was declared "missing in action."
His subsequent fate is known to us thanks to the materials of The Black Book, which was written by a team of Soviet journalists under Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman in 1943-1946, and published for the first time in Israel in 1980.
The Black Book cites the testimony of the engineer Farber, who tells of the Jewish inmates of Ponar, who were forced to cremate the bodies of the murdered inmates of the Vilna Ghetto as part of Aktion 1005, a secret operation conducted by the Nazis to destroy evidence of their atrocities. Farber singles out Yakobson, speaking of him with particular warmth: "One of the prisoners was Veniamin Yulyevich Yakobson, a 54-year-old pharmacist from Leningrad. He was an exceptionally amiable person, who took fatherly care of the inmates. In his pocket, he always carried some ointments, bandages, and powders. He was held in high esteem. Whenever an argument broke out, Yakobson would restore peace."
Veniamin Yakobson was executed by the Germans in January 1944.
The building of Yakobson's pharmacy still stands in the town of Odoyev.
