My First Life

Contents

A Note of Thanks…

Foreword

Essen, Germany

Amsterdam,1939

Holland, 1940–42

The Big Test

To Be or Not to Be

Another Border Crossing

France, 1943

A Christmas Leave

The French Resistance

Paris in the Springtime

D-Day

Buchenwald

The Liberation

Post-War Reactions

Reunion

Goodbye Europe

A Note of Thanks…

This book would not have been possible without the patience and cooperation of my wife, Ellen, who made an all-out attempt to shelter me in my working area during some long winter nights.

I also acknowledge the clerical expertise of Ita and Lorraine, who kept me away from the typewriter.

—Henry L. Goldsmith

Foreword

Henry Goldsmith lived the American Dream as well and as successfully as anyone can who was born in another place in a very different time. He arrived in New York with his wife and infant son, Frank after World War II and by 1954 owned a house and an electronics business in Queens, New York. He was the father of two sons and, eventually, the grandfather of two more. In the 1950s he became passionate about skiing; the 1970s he bought a summer house north of the city, the better to indulge in it. The skiing resolved him to move to Aspen, Colorado, in 1975, where he started another electronics store. He retired in 1986 without ever having slowed down much. He worked out at the Aspen Athletic Club, went to the mountains whenever he could, and took up volunteer work, giving talks at local schools about his first life, the one that ended when he came to America, and the one you will read about here.

As to what kind of man he was, the measure of his character, the impact he made on the different times he lived, his family knows, as do his friends, as will the people who read this book. Words that will likely come to mind include energetic, determined, and quick thinking. American virtues, all of them. Virtues that grow in this country but don’t have to be native to it. Perhaps he could be more ruthless than most people know how to be—but the world, by the time he reached the New one, had handed him reasons to develop that trait. Wherever he found himself, he never did worse than survive—itself too often a huge task—and when circumstances allowed, he turned his gifts toward prospering. This book, really, is less about all of that than about how he survived twelve years on a continent ruled by the Nazis, who were determined to murder him for being a Jew.

When Henry died in 2001, he left behind a manuscript about how he survived the Holocaust to enter what he always referred to as his second life. As to his first life… Six million dead, and we don’t know what stories those individuals would tell from wherever they have gone. That’s six million stories, gone. Those six million have one single story to tell the world, which in itself is a form of immolation—to condense six million individual lives to one number, one story. About what those individuals experienced, we only know what the survivors can tell us about it, and there are plenty of memoirs to enlighten us on that, all of them important for their testimony, but—just as important—for the reminder they offer that everyone who was murdered in the camps or the eastern forests was an individual who today must rely on others’ memories to speak for them.

There is a question that serves as an undertow to all Holocaust memoirs: How did these ones survive? There are different ways to look at it. Some survived by losing their moral compass, or by never having had one. Henry was not one of those—but they were out there, the kapos, the ghetto police, the ones who helped the Nazis do their work in exchange for a little more time. Some were simply fortunate, the recipients of one or more random acts of chance that fell in their favor, acts as simple as a wave of a riding crop on a railroad siding or a work detail that turned toward the camp gates. Some of them escaped the Third Reich overseas, and some were hidden by those good people on both sides whom any war seems too busy to interfere with. And then some were fortunate, but something inside them provided more than luck, or made them know how to use the luck that opened for them. And some, finally, became fighters of some kind. They might not have become that otherwise, but the war brought out that side of them. Henry was one of them, and let us not forget how many were like him. Whether they were fighting a partisan war in the Russian forests, or going underground in Western Europe, they survived by learning to strike back at a world that had struck first.

And that last way, really, brings us to Henry’s story. Staying alive can be one way of fighting back, but it is possible to do more, and Henry was one who did. He survived by fleeing to Holland, and from there finding a way to join the French Resistance. And when the Nazis found him anyway… well, read on. I’m sure you’ll have read nothing like it before.

Every manuscript has its own story besides the one it contains. In 1998, an American named Joe Rosenbaum attended a Rotary Club meeting in Aspen, Colorado, and found himself seated next to an older gentleman, a Holocaust survivor with a German accent named Kurt Bresnitz. They got to talking, and Joe learned that Kurt had escaped Nazi-occupied Europe from his birthplace, Vienna. And Kurt, it turned out, had a friend in Aspen named Henry, who had written a wonderful book about his own struggles against the Nazi regime. He had written the manuscript in English, which was not his native tongue, and Kurt described how Henry was struggling to get his story published. The wheels in Joe’s head began to turn. He had just returned with his wife from a visit to Auschwitz, on the March of the Living and he was of a mind to do something about what he seen there.

Joe gave Henry a call, and they got along well, but Henry died before they could meet. But Henry have sons Frank and Steven who was anxious for his father’s story to be published they gave Joe a copy of the manuscript. From that day on, Joe made it a cause to find a publisher for My First Life. He recruited his son-in-law, Ben Hunter, for help, and Ben after a series of side alleys found his way to an editor in Toronto, Matthew Kudelka, who makes one specialty of stories like Henry’s.

All of the people mentioned in this foreword hope that the story you’re about to read is as amazing to you as it has been to us.

Henry wasn’t a professional writer, and his English, while good, was not his first language. His story has not been altered in any way, nor has anything been deleted or added. But if he would have said something in a different way if his English had been stronger, he has been helped.

Finally, we can wish he had been here to add to his account, because the book would have been longer and perhaps richer, and there are some inevitable lacunae. Gaps that relate to the historical record have been filled with a word or two. But there are others that only he could have filled for us. How did he actually join the French Resistance? We’ll never know. What happened to the other people in the book? His family, his friends, his lovers. Henry Goldsmith died May 3, 2001, his wife Ellen died Dec 23,2010, Gilsela Samrels Sichrer Lives is Israel.

His son Frank and wife Cynthia and two sons Alex and Garrett live in Aspen CO, Steven Frank’s younger brother lives in Hawaii. It’s too late to ask Henry. So we ask you to tolerate that. He was not a professional writer, which besides drawbacks, has its advantages. Mainly, the advantage of authenticity, because you will know that he was there, and that this is what he saw and did.

—Matthew Kudelka 2009/2011

Essen, Germany

The year was 1921. Germany had lost its war two-and-a-half years earlier. The country was in turmoil and inflation was soaring to unimaginable levels. The U.S. dollar had been worth 35 marks the year before. Now it was worth 184, and by 1923 it would be worth 4.2 billion. In those days, it was fashionable to light your cigar using a million-mark note for a taper.

For a time after the war ended in 1918, radical political parties from the right and the left had conducted pitched battles on the streets of German cities, both sides trying to undermine the postwar government of Friedrich Ebert. The far-left Spartacist League had made an especially strong show, under the leadership of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. In 1919, after those two were murdered by the Freikorps, far-right paramilitaries, the Spartacists renamed themselves the German Communist Party (KPD). The country was only beginning to calm down.

The Treaty of Versailles had crushed and humiliated Germany. The victors had demanded, and received, huge reparation payments from Germany as punishment for starting the war. The loser also had to give back certain border territories to their original owners. Meanwhile, Allied soldiers continued to occupy parts of the Rhineland and the Ruhr. The bitterness on both sides was palpable.

In June 1922, Walter Rathenau, Germany’s Secretary for Reconstruction, was assassinated by two right-wing army officers. In November of the following year, in Munich, a cashiered army corporal and political firebrand named Adolf Hitler attempted to launch a revolution in the name of National Socialism. He failed miserably, but fourteen people died during the attempt and Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in Landsberg Castle (he was released after nine months). He passed his days in prison dictating Mein Kampf to his cellmate, Rudolph Hess. The people of Germany were looking for people to blame for the lost war, and they soon began turning out in droves to listen to Hitler, who was a mesmerizing speaker with a clear political message.

By then, Alfred Goldschmitt was thirty-nine years old and had been married for one year to Sabine, whom he had met when she was a saleswoman at the Freudenberg Department Store. Alfred was a widower, his first wife having died of an incurable illness, leaving him with two daughters, Friedel and Irma, twelve and ten years old.

A proud veteran of the Great War, he married Sabine despite some misgivings. She was a devout Jew, the daughter of a large, conservative family in the central Rhine, and he was not. Which way should I turn? he wondered. Should he continue to be a German patriot or should he embrace Judaism? By then, Theodor Herzl had scandalized many people with his insistence that Judaism had to become more than a religion—it must become a political entity with its own state.

Alfred was an decent and honorable man, the owner of a tobacco shop, who took an active part in community affairs, but when it came to religion, he had his own creed: Act according to your conscience and don’t be afraid of anybody.

It wasn’t easy for him to support his family during the economic turmoil that bedeviled postwar Germany, but he had ambition, a keen eye for business, and the help of a good woman both in the shop and at home. So he succeeded.

On March 14, 1923, I entered this world. I was the first son in the family, and the first and most probably the only child of Alfred’s new marriage, with two babysitters ready and waiting for me. I was loved at first sight by everyone, without even having to ask.

I was nicknamed Heinz, and would be called Heinzchen for many years. To honor my grandfather, they gave me the middle name of Leo.

There was no longer open war on the streets, but Germany still faced enormous problems, including an unstable government. In 1925, General Paul von Hindenburg was elected president at the age of 78. He was an aristocrat as well as war hero. Unfortunately he was head of state only in name, and while the political turmoil continued, unemployment continued to soar.

My parents dealt with a very popular product that most people used, so they were able to open two more stores in different parts of the city, which at the time had a population of around 650,000. We rented an apartment behind the original store. Even in those days security was an issue, so my parents bought a full-grown German Shepherd and trained him to protect both the shop and our home. Rolf was so aggressive and powerful that one day he killed a smaller dog while playing with it. My parents had to build a cage for him in our backyard. Only at night did they give him free run, attached to a long chain.

Rolf let me get away with everything, and the rougher I played, the better he liked it. But as it turned out, he had his limits. One day when I was four, I discovered the miracle of a yardstick and spent a whole afternoon pretending to measure everything around me. Running out of objects, I turned my attention to my four-legged Rolf. Such a beautiful long muzzle he had. I placed my yardstick on top of it. That he considered an aggressive act, and he retaliated by snapping at my lower lip and taking a little chunk out of it. The scar remains to this day. Such was my first encounter with danger.

I grew old enough to have my own bedroom, small but mine. I’m not quite sure whether the framed poem by Goethe over my bed was meant to be an inspiration or just a decoration. I must have decided quite early it was the former. Those lines read: Allen Gewalten zum Trotz sich erhalten, nimmer sich beugen, kraftig sich zeigen. Exercise defiance to all terror, never submit to it, show your strength.

Those words planted themselves deep in my mind, and I have lived by them to this day. I’m sure they saved my life over and over again.

At the age of six, Little Heinzchen had his first day at school. Of course that included a visit to the photographer’s studio for the traditional picture in knickers and holding a sugarcone. I quickly made friends with three other boys in my class and we began hanging out together whenever we could, which earned us the gangland moniker: The Four Leaf Clover. Fate would be tough on my friends. Bernd, the youngest, died during an appendectomy when he was ten. Lothar, the oldest, perished in a concentration camp. Ralph made it to Israel, only to pass away in his forties from a lingering illness.

I made other after-school friends in the neighborhood. Our market square was used in the morning for its intended purpose; in the afternoons, after it was washed and cleaned, it was ours to play on. We rode our bicycles around it, played football on it, and otherwise hung out there, always on the lookout for a good fight. The Ruhr was Germany’s industrial heartland, and its people were tough. You learned soon enough to ask questions later. At the merest hint of an insult, you attacked. After all, you had to defend your honor and territory.

The street fights got bigger and bigger. Armed with bats and sometimes knives, we’d defend our neighborhood against all hostile intruders. When we decided that things had got too quiet, we’d resort to a cunning tactic: we’d send the shortest kid in our gang to find our enemies and heckle them, while the rest of us hid in doorways, armed and ready. Sooner or later the other gang’s patience would run out and they’d punch the little pain-in-the-butt. Right away, the closest warrior on our side—usually a tall guy—would step out and declare: You hit my little brother! You’re gonna pay for that! We’d all come out of our hiding places and