Posted on 11/16/2009 12:30:24 PM PST by 2banana
Escaping the Nazis By: JOHN MULLANE Bucks County Courier Times
The memories haunt Danny Goldsmith. Chill night. Nazi troopers storming his street in Belgium, pounding on doors, smashing them. He, his mother and baby sister, Lillian, hid on a rooftop as the beam of a German soldier's flashlight swept past them. It was 1942. He was 10.
"At one point, I peeked over the cornice and saw our Jewish neighbors being dragged into the street in their night clothes and put in trucks," he said to a packed room this week in Arlington, Va.
His parents' wedding photo was on a large screen behind him.
"Up until this point," he said, "I remember a happy childhood."
Goldsmith, who lives in Bucks County, accompanied members of the Jewish War Veterans Post 697 of Levittown to Arlington to address employees of the General Services Administration, the supply agency to the federal government. It is part of the post's circuit to present accounts of eyewitnesses to the Holocaust, which killed 6 million Jews in Europe.
Post 697 usually travels to schools in Bucks and Burlington counties. Last year, a teacher from Bucks County contacted her daughter, who works for the GSA, to urge her to invite the men to Arlington. The group appeared at the department's observance of Veterans Day.
"You are the last generation to hear about the Holocaust from people who actually experienced it," said emcee Jerry Goldstein, the post's former commander.
The Goldsmiths were a middle-class family. Father was a plumber. Mother, a homemaker. When the National Socialists under Hitler invaded Belgium, millions of Jews were sent notices to report to work camps. Among them was Goldsmith's father. He recalled his father's words as he departed on a train.
"He told me, 'You are the little man of the family now, and you must take care of your sister and mother.' I told him I would. Like that, I grew up."
After the street raid, his mother placed him and his sister in the care of Catholic nuns at a nearby convent. The Goldsmith children were separated for the duration of the war, as they were passed from one secret protector to another. Thousands of Jewish children survived this way. Advertisement
Goldsmith was placed in a Catholic boys' orphanage. A priest created false baptismal papers for him.
"I blended in. I even became an altar boy for the sake of appearances," he said.
The orphanage was raided by the Nazis and the boys were made to disrobe. Boys who were circumcised - a giveaway that they were Jewish - were taken away.
Goldsmith was placed on a train bound for a concentration camp with a half-dozen other Jewish boys, some as young as 5.
The oldest, Joseph, 16, took charge. He tore a small hole in the train car. One by one, he dropped them to safety each time the train slowed. They regrouped, bruised and bleeding, but alive. Joseph sought help from a priest. The priest secretly placed each child with a parish family. Goldsmith was hidden in an attic.
"I could not make a sound and I was only allowed outside at night," he said.
Meanwhile, his mother had joined the Belgian Resistance, and lost her left leg in a bombing. When the war ended, the family was reunited, but without Goldsmith's father.
The Goldsmith children prayed their father would return. But three years later, they gave up and presumed him to be dead. They moved on. They left Europe and came to America.
"We never really knew what had happened to my father," he said.
But on a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., several years ago, a research librarian gave him a book containing the names of Belgians who had been deported to work camps in 1942. In the book was his father's name. He had been sent to Auschwitz. Within three months of arriving, he was killed in a gas chamber.
"Soon, there will be no one to tell these stories firsthand," Goldsmith said. "I'm 77 and I'm one of the younger ones, I'm considered a child survivor."
Time is fleeting. The men of Post 697 have much work ahead.
1. Amazing examples of non-violent and extremely dangerous resistance by the Church/Christians to the Nazis. To be caught hiding or helping a Jew was a death sentence.
2. I am astonished that that any newspaper actually referenced what Nazi actually stands for
3. Everyday Obama takes us a little closer to National Socialism.
Bingo.
Remember...this took place in Belgium, not Germany. If the boy was in German hands he would have been toast.
A priest created false baptismal papers for him.
"I blended in. I even became an altar boy for the sake of appearances," he said."
Stories like these make me really proud to be Catholic, and I am glad that he survived the horrors of Nazism.
Not sure what the point of these things are. They keep saying, “we must never forget,” then they all forget, and vote for Obama.
Hank
A much better America waged war against the Nazis back then. Now we have a foreigner for president. An alien. A Kenyan. A man alien to American ideals who was abandoned by his two Muslim fathers, who had a hippie mother and a communist mentor (Frank Marshall Davis)
I don’t think Obama quite rises to this level.
That first one was never his father.
“I don’t think Obama quite rises to this level.”
No one ever does, but Obama is a socialist, and believes in classes and when socialism fails, it must find some class to use as the scapegoat. It might not be the Jews this time, but it will happen. All those FEMA camps aren’t for nothing.
Maybe people do not see what Obama is, but you’d have to be blind not to know he’s a socialist, and the Jews, at least know the suffering social inflicts on people from both Germany and Russia.
But they have apparently forgotten.
Hank
I think you are pretty safe from the FEMA camps. That kind of paranoia went out with Clinton. Obama isn’t smart enough to pull this kind of thing off. And he has surrounded himself with morons. I’m not worried about being tossed into a camp. I’m more worried he will drive us off a cliff economically.
And then there is that Polish nurse -- Irina Something (Sobel?)-- who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Price in her later years: the same year as Al Gore. She did many of these same deeds, removing children hidden in her doctor's bag and hiding them in an ambulence and distributing them amongst Catholic families with new names, false papers, etc. She recorded all of the real names of the Jewish children and their families and where they went, put the slips of paper in a jar and buried the jar(s) under her apple tree. She was captured herself, incarcerated, and beaten badly. After the war she recovered the names and helped the children find their families. If there were no families left, she helped them get to Israel.
You'd think that they would give her the Peace prize, but they gave it to Al Gore instead. Disgusting.
She died recently and her consolation was that one of the children she saved took care of her in her declining years. I think she is a saint. Incredible bravery and incredible love.
“would have been toast.”
Shall we pardon your pun?
Too bad he just didn’t convert to Christianity at some point but it still doesn’t detract from the incredibly brave act of this priest!
“I’m more worried ...”
Your the only one who brought up being “worried.”
I’m just disgusted, and tired of having 60 year old history brought up, as though it were really important, and those same people completely ignoring the very horrors that are going on right now, and actually contributing to it.
Hank
I don’t think we can even comprehend the horror and nothing close to it exists in America today. If you honestly think that members of our military are going to march down the street, pull us from our homes and toss us into camps, you have a very disrespectful view of our men and women in uniform.
Obama is no Hitler or Stalin.
Not at this point in time but who knows what the future holds?
Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it. Winston Churchill
The reason that people are ignoring the horrors going on right now is because they were never taught the horrors that could happen.
“If you honestly think that members of our military are going to march down the street, pull us from our homes and toss us into camps, you have a very disrespectful view of our men and women in uniform.”
You’re the only one who had that thought. What’s the matter with you, I didn’t say (or think) anything like that.
Doesn’t really matter what Obama is, however, he’s just a puppet. What do you know about those pulling his strings?
Hank
Oops. Sorry. NOT Churchill. George Santayana.
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