Jacoby came to Britain from Vienna as part of the ‘Kindertransport’ (children’s transport), which evacuated 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. At the age of 12, leaving behind her parents and friends, she travelled with her sister from Nazi-occupied Vienna to Falmouth, Cornwall.
Moving to Oxford to attend secretarial school, she left this for a career involving books, first at Oxford City Library, then at the university bookshop Parkers’, and finally at the antiquarian booksellers A. Rosenthal. In Oxford she met her husband, Stan Joseph, and moved to Sheffield, where she attended Sheffield University and eventually became a teacher.
From her childhood, she kept a diary, which she allowed to be published when, later in life, she wanted to show her gratitude to those who were prepared to take in refugees during a time of rationing and austerity. Both a recorded oral history and a doll that accompanied her from Vienna to Falmouth are now in the collections of the Imperial War Museum.