The Anti-Defamation League Mountain States Region is pleased to share with our community the following interview with Stefan and Serge Goldberg, second generation Holocaust survivors and supporters of ADL’s Hidden Child Foundation. We recently spoke with the Goldbergs to learn more about their family’s story of survival and legacy for the future.

 

ADL: We are so grateful that you were able to share your story with us recently during Holocaust Remembrance Week.

 

Serge and Stefan Goldberg: “Holocaust Awareness Life” might describe the mindset of Holocaust survivors and their children better than “Holocaust Awareness Week.” The Holocaust determined our existence as directly as the Exodus from Egypt defined the first generations of Jews wandering through the desert and into The Promised Land, or how the experience of transatlantic slavery permeates the lives of generations of African American survivors. We are grateful for this opportunity to share an account of our family’s search for information, understanding, meaning, and value that continues to evolve. Personal and global circumstances keep changing and influencing how we understand and communicate our relationship with the Holocaust.

 

ADL: Please describe your family’s experience for us.

 

S & S G: Our mother, Anni, and her brother, Benno, survived the Holocaust, separated from their parents and hidden by two Catholic families in Brussels and other nearby locations in Belgium. Shortly after separating from the children, their parents – our grandparents – were arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Anni and Benno immigrated to the United States in 1948 at the ages of 13 and 10 and, through many challenges and adventures, joined our father’s family in Washington, DC.

 

Our father’s grandfather had immigrated in about 1896 from Lithuania as a teenager, before training as a glazier and establishing a family business. Following in his footsteps, our paternal grandfather installed the windows in the new (1951) Adas Israel synagogue in Washington. However, our father hoped to avoid being drawn into the family business. Our parents married in 1952 and, after three years in the US Navy, they moved to Colorado.

 

ADL: You have said that this experience influenced your parents’ and your own Jewish identities. How so?

 

S & S G:  At least three strains of Judaism converged in our family, forming how each of three sons developed separate interests in understanding our family origins and observing our religion. 1) The most dramatic influence on what it meant to us to be Jewish came from our mother. Our mother’s Judaism was like her French language, part of her but not something she wanted to display. 2) Our father’s maternal grandparents had been observant Jews in Ukraine and Lithuania. Our grandmother’s father was a Jewish educator, and our grandmother grew up as a Conservative Jew. 3) Our father’s grandfather had a minimal religious observance, although Yiddish remained his most fluent language. Neither our father nor his father had a Bar Mitzvah, even though our father, at his mother’s insistence, was trained and equipped for one. We grew up mostly secular, except for occasional attendance at the synagogue our father had designed and helped build in Boulder, Colorado.

 

ADL: Please tell us about your search for information about your family history.

 

S & S G: Although we grew up with our mother’s settled (though unsettling) belief that her parents had been killed at Dachau, our uncle’s need to know more about his parents led him to do more research, ultimately learning after combing through historical lists and certificates that Auschwitz, rather than Dachau, was their final destination. Our mother passed away in 2007. No longer constrained by our mother’s need to protect herself and her children from painful memories and discoveries about her childhood, Serge attended a  Zen Peacemakers International Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz in 2014 and again in subsequent years with Stefan and our father.

 

Directly after the 2014 Retreat, Serge went in search of some of our family roots across Germany and Belgium. He first visited Essen and discovered that there was no trace of the home where our mother and uncle were born. Their pre-war neighborhood had been devastated by Allied bombing during the war. He also visited the Alte Synagogue of Essen, where our grandfather taught Hebrew. The synagogue was badly damaged in 1938 during Kristallnacht, the event of our mother’s earliest memory, but survived the Allied bombings. From Essen, Serge visited the neighborhoods in Brussels where our grandparents, Ludwig and Pepi, and their children found refuge after fleeing Germany, and waited anxiously, but ultimately in vain, for approval from the US State Department to emigrate to the US. He also found the house where our mother and uncle had been hidden by a Catholic family, separated from their parents for safer hiding.

 

ADL: How did your experience at the Bearing Witness Retreats and meeting other survivors and their families affect you?

 

S & S G: The Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau, with its 120 participants from many countries, was a celebration and acknowledgement of the value and importance of diversity in a place built to destroy diversity. The retreats brought us awareness that our mother and uncle, Anni and Benno, were not as alone in the world as they had grown up believing. Newly discovered first cousins in Israel and their children, and other new friends, made through these explorations, have become cherished parts of our lives.

 

ADL: What’s next for you in the process of uncovering your family’s roots?

 

S & S G: COVID-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and advancing years have interfered with some additional family research activities we have planned. We continue our search to learn more about our origins, to understand better our place in the world, believing that the search itself also helps to make the world a better place, even if only in small ways. We plan to return to Oświęcim and its Center for Dialogue and Prayer, again to celebrate diversity at a place that invaders stole from Poland to destroy diversity, to visit Auschwitz again, and to meditate again on the selection ramp at Birkenau. As we explored our grandfather’s origins in and around Częstochowa in 2017, we look forward to exploring our grandmother’s birthplace, Vyzhnytsia, in Ukraine.

 

Editorial note: This story has been condensed for publication. To read the full text of Serge and Stefan’s family story and legacy, please click here.