"Death lay in wait for me at every turn of a winding road for no cause other than my Jewish birth." -- Rene Goldman

Rene Goldman had a long career teaching Chinese history at UBC before he retired with his wife to Summerland and wrote Childhood on the Move: Memoirs of a child-survivor of the Holocaust (2014). More than half of Goldman's book is devoted to his time in France from 1942 to 1950. It was in France, where the government and its police collaborated so zealously with the "Final Solution," that he experienced his own closest brush with death.

"French cooperation led to the death of so many Jews from France,” he told Pat Johnson of Zachor in 2017. “The deportation to the camps — over 75,000 Jews from France were deported to Auschwitz and other camps — was basically the work of the French. All the roundups were done by the French police and the Jews were denounced or reported to the authorities by French people."

As a small child, Goldman survived in the shadow of terror across three countries in succession: Luxembourg, where he was born in 1934, Belgium, where his parents thought they had found refuge in 1940, and France. He remembers the introduction of the wearing of the yellow star in Brussels in 1942, when he was eight years old, and seeing signs going up in front of cinemas and parks saying that Jews and dogs were not allowed. "That's when I was beginning to feel fear and dread."

When the family fled for a second time, as the Nazis advanced into the Benelux countries, the Goldmans planned to leave France and sail to safety in South America from France's so-called "free zone" in the south governed by the German-puppet Vichy regime. His father was fortunately absent during an unexpected round-up of Jews. During this period, they were temporarily housed in a hotel with other migrants in the town of Lons-Le-Saunier in central France. At around 8 a.m. his mother tried to get him to cry, hoping that might move the heart of the police who were collecting him, but he could not summon any tears.

"The entire station was a scene of bedlam, with men, women and children being pulled, shoved and hurled into the train," he recalled. "Just as the commissar was about to throw me into the train as well, two gendarmes in khaki uniforms appeared in the nick of time to stop him. Without a word he let go of me... That was the last time I saw my Mama." Goldman was spared due to the intervention of his mother's older sister who had become a French citizen. At the time, that distinction still mattered. After hiding in a series of rural villages, Rene Goldman found refuge in a Catholic institution where Jewish children were assigned new identities. He was warned to never allow anyone to see his private parts "since in France only Jews were circumcised."

At war's end, he was placed under the care of the left-leaning Commission Centrale de l'Enfance (CCE), living in group homes and being indoctrinated with communist ideals. Instead of migrating to Canada with an uncle and aunt, he remained in Europe, hoping to hear some news of his father. Relatives had chosen to withhold the grim truth from him. He eventually went to Poland for three years where he worked for the Polish national radio network and became aware of antisemitic purges in Czechoslovakia and Moscow. Goldman searched for evidence of his parents after the war. He discovered some evidence of his mother's presence in a convoy sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. His mother had first been taken south from Lons-Le-Saunier to a detention camp at Rivesaltes in the Pyrenees, then north to another collection depot at Drancy, a suburb of Paris.

"Of the 407 women who arrived at Birkenau on that train, only 147 were registered and had a number tattooed on their forearm; the others were sent directly to the gas chambers, I can only assume that my mother, being small and frail, was among the latter, unless she died because of the atrocious conditions in which the doomed passengers of that train travelled. I never learned for certain what happened to her; there will never be closure for me."

In 1953, he accepted an opportunity to study in China for five years but soon came to the realization that the communism of Mao Zedong was also dangerous and despicable. By 1958, with the onset of the Great Leap Forward, famine would soon result in the deaths of between 30 and 40 million Chinese. Goldman received a scholarship to Columbia University and arrived in the United States in 1960. He came to Canada in 1963 and pursued his academic career in Vancouver, at UBC. In 1965, Goldman was able to speak to a man who described the death of Goldman's father in his arms in 1945, during a death march twenty years earlier from Auschwitz.

"I bear witness to a tragedy unprecedented in history, during which six million Jews, including my entire family in Poland, with the single exception of one uncle, were murdered in cold blood. I seek here to offer my modest contribution to the perpetuation of the memory of that tragedy in the fervent hope that it will neither be forgotten, nor denied. May present and future readers find in these memoirs matter for reflection and, perhaps will some discover in them an avenue of research.

"I belong to the generation of survivors who in the 1980s received recognition as a class different from that of adult survivors of the Shoah. We are known as the "child-survivors," who were too young to comprehend why the Nazis and their collaborators across Europe waged a war of extermination against us. We are also known as the "hidden children," since we survived in hiding in various ways, mainly under the protection of caring Gentiles.

"Like many of my peers, I have over the decades written and spoken publicly in schools, universities, churches, about my personal experience as a child-survivor of the Shoah. My family and people of various walks of life have encouraged me to write my story. Thus motivated, I put pen to paper in the late evening of my life... I deem it nothing short of miraculous that I survived all those times of anguish and pain."

In an interview for the Azrieli Foundation, Goldman said, "My hope is that my memoir will contribute to the knowledge of the Second World War, to knowledge of the Shoah, show how far racism can go, what anti-Semitism was in Europe. It was a cancer in the heart of Western Civilization, not just in Europe but over here, too... and it is now coming back."

He soberly concluded, "I know how low human nature can descend... how very terrible people can become. I have no illusions. I don't believe in a good nature of people. I know that Anne Frank in her diary wrote that she still believed in the goodness of people. But I wonder. I think that once she got to Bergen-Belsen, she no longer had that idea. That's my educated guess."

BOOKS:

Childhood on the Move: Memoirs of a child-survivor of the Holocaust (2014). Printed by Island Blue in Victoria. $20 978-0-9876780-7-2

Reprinted as A Childhood Adrift (Second Story 2017) $14.95 97819888065175

[BCBW 2020] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit

 





 

 

 

A photo of Rene Goldman holding his bowl out for more food, at Andresy, circa 1945.

Also: Rene with parents Mira and Wolf Goldman