The Journey of Alfred Goldsteen’s Family: From Promising Lives to the Holocaust

By George H. Goldsteen

This book describes the history of the author’s grandparents, parents and other relatives from 1905 until about 1946 with a few details of a much later period. It gives an insight into their daily lives and the problems encountered during World War I, the various revolts in Germany following that war and its hyper inflation period, the crisis years during the 1930s, World War II and life in the Nazi concentration camps. It is based on the voluminous diaries kept during the war by the author’s mother and an uncle, on extensive recorded interviews with them and research by the author in various archives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Nov 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781543769142

George H. Goldsteen

George was born in the Netherlands and is a Holocaust survivor. He has several tertiary qualifications in nautical, hydrographic and mathematical sciences. He retired as a lecturer aged 52 and started teaching about Judaism and the Holocaust. He was in charge of the Launceston Hebrew Congregation for 25 years.

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ISBN

ISBN: 978-1-5437-6913-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5437-6915-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5437-6914-2 (e)

06/21/2023

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Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Early History of the Goldsteen Family

Chapter 2: Period 1905–1918

George and Carolina Marry; Kohlscheid: Alfred and Carl Are Born; Rheydt: Carolina’s Hat Shop; Early School Experiences; Alfred and Carl Growing Up

Chapter 3: World War I: 1914–1919

Carl’s Early War Experiences; The Boys’ Daily Activities; The Kaiser Needs Copper for Ammunition; When the War Ended; Lack of Food; Alfred’s Bar Mitzvah; Abraham’s Family History; Uncle Louis Goldsteen; Spanish Flu and Aachen

Chapter 4: Period 1920–1925

Further Adventures of Alfred and Carl; Further on Alfred’s and Carl’s Education; Chanukkah Play; The Three Brothers Are Thieves; Alfred Quits School and Begins Work

Chapter 5: Turbulent Times in Germany, 1918–1925

Weimar Republic; Spartakus Revolt; Carl’s Experiences during the Spartakus Revolt; The Kapp Putsch; Rathenau’s Murder and Other Assassinations; Separatist Revolt; Carl’s Experiences during the Separatist Revolt; Rise of the Nazi Party; War Reparations Lead to Hyper-inflation; Hyper-inflation and Its Effects in Germany; Foolish Allies’ Demands Continued; Moving to Vaals; Smuggling Becomes Popular in Limburg; Social Activities in Vaals; Alfred Builds His First Radio Receiver; Alfred Volunteers for the Dutch Army

Chapter 6: Period 1925 – 1930

Goldsteens Move to Amsterdam;

Chapter 7: Period 1931–1939

Life during the World-wide Economic Crisis; Jewish Life; Dutch Antisemitism; Rearming Germany?; Carl’s Marriage and Hospitalisation

Chapter 8: Tine Goldsteen-Hoen’s Life, 1909–1939

Tine’s Education; Her Life during World War I; Her Life after World War I; Her Life in 1930 – 1939; She Meets Her Future Husband; Tine and Alfred Get Engaged; They Get Married

Chapter 9: Alfred’s Story

German Education System; Alfred Looking for Work; Carl Meets Alfred’s Future Wife; Carolina Meets Future Daughter-in-Law; Alfred’s and Tine’s Married Life

Chapter 10: Period 1939–1946

Alfred Called up for General Army Mobilisation; Alfred the Idealist Until . . .; Widespread Suicides in the Netherlands; Ghetto Established in Amsterdam; Carl Leaves Laren; Carl’s Eye-Opening Experience; Gershon Responds to Sad Story; Carl in Nijmegen; Alfred Finds Hiding Places; Carl Evacuated

Chapter 11: Extracts from Carl’s Diaries

Carl in St. Canisius Hospital; The Welsh Guards; Continuing His Diary Extracts; Some of His Other Experiences; Continuing Our Conversation

Chapter 12: Tine’s Experiences, 1942–1945

George Is Born; Tine Travels to Show George to Relatives; Betty Talens Fills in the Details; Back to Tine’s Diary; Alfred Is Arrested; Naughty George; Searching for Food; Cost of Some Foods in 1944/1945; Janny’s Birth; Back to Tine’s Other Diary; Effects of Germany’s Anti-Jewish Decrees; Alfred’s Resignation and What Followed; Friction with His Father-in-Law; Alfred Is in the Resistance

Chapter 13: Nazi Germany Could Easily Round up Jews

Napoleon’s Civil Code Laws Provide People’s Details and Addresses; Anti-Jewish Laws in the Netherlands; Exemption from Deportation or Forced Labour; What Happened to Frits and His Family? Elfriede’s Letter to Her Sister-in-Law; Frits’ Daughter, Carry, in Hiding; What Happened to the Mendel Side of the Family?

Chapter 14: Carolina’s experiences

Germany Blocks Jewish Bank Accounts; German Anti-Jewish Measures in Geleen; Her Hat Shop Confiscated; Further Correspondence with Relatives; She Goes into Hiding; Attempts to Fool Her Persecutors; Where Did She Go?; Betrayal by a Friend; Oma Carolina and Tante Elfriede Betrayed and Arrested

Chapter 15: Alfred Now Also Wanted

Back to Tine’s Description; Should Alfred Escape?; Tine Finds out What happened to Alfred; Dolle Dinsdag: The Netherlands Almost Liberated

Chapter 16: The Hunger Winter

Caught Cutting Fire-wood; Lack of Heating Fuel and Other Difficulties; Some Food Relief

Chapter 17: Alfred’s Arrest and Imprisonment

Alfred Writes Tine about His Arrest; Background and More Details of His Arrest; Life in Prison; Alfred Transferred to Transit Camp at Westerbork; Deportation to Auschwitz; Alfred’s Last Letters before Deportation; Close Friend Julie Verdoner’s Experiences in the Camps

Chapter 18: Tine’s Thoughts and Feelings of Despair and Hope

Chapter 19: Alfred after Auschwitz

Eyewitness Account of Alfred’s Murder; Life in Mauthausen and Gusen Camps; Reports about the Mauthausen Concentration Camp; The Star of Zion; Eyewitness Report on the Mauthausen Concentration Camp; Stufe III: Die Ordnung des Terrors by Ulrike Weiser;

Chapter 20: Where Was Alfred Goldsteen Murdered?

Chapter 21: The War Finally Ends

Tine’s Further Diary and Interview Recording Combined; Tine Receives Confirmation of Alfred’s Death; After Effects on George and Janny; Tine Receives a Widow’s Pension

Chapter 22: Family Experiences after War’s End

Carl’s Struggles; Carl’s Emotions upon Hearing of Alfred’s Murder; Further Correspondence between Carl, Tine and Me; Carl’s Knee Finally Operated On; A Decent German; Another Talent in the Family; Carl Becomes Our Guardian; Carl’s Life after Liberation Was Not Always a Blessing; Carl’s Attempts for Compensation from Germany; Revival of Antisemitism

Epilogue

Commemoration of Victims

Bibliography

Appendix A:

German Nazi Laws Decreed against Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945*)

Appendix B:

Letters Alfred Sent to Tine from the Transit Camp at Westerbork in 1944

Appendix C:

Letters of Condolences for Alfred

Appendix D:

Letter to the Mayor of Geleen in 1946

Appendix E:

Partial List of Members of the Goldsteen Family Murdered by the Nazis

Appendix F:

Goldsteen Family Tree

Appendix G:

Record of Alfred’s Army Service

Appendix H:

Alfred’s Sailing Logbook

Appendix I:

Descendants of George and Carolina Goldsteen

Appendix J:

Glossary of Foreign Words and Locations of Place Names

Appendix K:

Map of the Netherlands and Germany with Place Names Mentioned in the Book

Foreword

My original idea was to write a book about my father, Alfred Goldsteen. I possess numerous photos, documents and correspondence, but mostly I had to rely on what my mother told me over the years. Naturally, she was not able to tell me much about Alfred’s life before their marriage. Fortunately, his younger brother Carl survived the Holocaust and had a phenomenal memory, so I interviewed him a number of times. I later interviewed my mother, who lived just down the street from us in Launceston. So there was a taped record of both their testimonies. Of course, once we were living in Tasmania, Carl and I corresponded by email to answer my many additional questions. A few years before his passing and after his wife Phyllis passed away, I visited him twice in Canada and obtained much more information that I could use.

Carl spoke mostly of his own experiences and gave me the diaries he had kept during the war from April 1943 until late 1945. Therefore I decided that this book should be about Alfred and Carl as well as some other close relatives. The main reason for my writing this book is to compile a record of the lives of my close relatives. They went through the Second World War, when most of them were murdered by the German Nazi regime and its collaborators. The book starts with the background of the Goldsteen family that came from Bavaria in the late eighteenth century. It then continues with the description of the lives of my grandparents George Goldsteen and Carolina Mendel and their descendants until just after the end of the Second World War. However, I do relate some events and comments that concern a later period.

My current relatives would never be able to acquaint themselves with our family history before the end of this war in May 1945, unless I wrote this book. Even so, after my mother and Carl passed away, I slowly began to realise there were still many questions I should have asked, but they never occurred to me until it was too late.

On my mother’s side of the family no one was Jewish. They suffered hunger during the last winter of the war, when many thousands of Dutch non-Jewish people starved to death. Thankfully, all of my mother’s blood relatives, their spouses and children survived.

It is because of the horrible things that were perpetrated against the Jews that I felt this book should only be about the Jewish side of my family of whom more than 95 were murdered (see list of names in Appendix E). Naturally, my mother is featured as she played a major role and suffered the loss of her husband, a loss she never recovered from. She had kept three different diaries during the war, which also gave me insights in what she was thinking and how she was feeling and coping.

I was 74 years old when I originally wrote this foreword and have waited far too long with writing the book, a delay caused by circumstances beyond my control. I should like to write a second book about my own life for the benefit of my offspring. However, whether I get around to it at my age when this book is finished is a big question. It is now the year 2022, and I am 80 years old!

Acknowledgements

Besides those mentioned in the introduction, I consulted many people over the years, while others assisted me.

I could never have written this book without the input of my mother, Tine Janna Goldsteen-Hoen (1909–2008) and my uncle Carl Goldsteen (1908–2005). I thank them from the bottom of my heart for never refusing to talk about that horrible period. Although they did not spend time in a concentration camp their experience was horrible enough to want to forget it all and therefore not want to speak of it. This happened a lot with survivors, so their offspring never learned anything about their parents’ experiences.

I thank my cousin Rachel (Carry) Herz-Goldsteen for providing me with some letters that were exchanged between her mother Elfriede Goldsteen-Gans, wife of Uncle Frederik, a.k.a. (also known as) Frits, and our grandmother Carolina and these were enlightening. We subsequently collaborated in exchanging information to fill each other in. For example, I never knew she and her mother were actually in hiding from the Germans for about two years with a Gentile family in Vaals (province of Limburg, which lies in the extreme south-east of the Netherlands).

Thanks to my daughter Chavivah, I came into contact with Jozef (Joop) Jacobs, who was making a family tree of the Goldsteen family. Without his enormous efforts to search the records in the various cities and towns, we would not know anything about our ancestors before my paternal grandparents or their relatives or members of other branches of the Goldsteen tribe. Thank you very much, Joop. Kol hakavod! (All the honour!)

My cousin Betty Balster-Talens was a teenager during the war. She remembered when my father visited her family during 1942 in Venlo, near the German border in Limburg, and that my grandmother Carolina also spent time at Betty’s home, probably in hiding from the Germans. She provided some interesting information and I did not know any of this. Thanks, Betty. Sadly, Betty will never read this, because she passed away on 17 September 2020 aged 89.

At the Amsterdam-based Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, NIOD), I was able to search through numerous documents. I did this mostly to find out what happened to my father when he was incarcerated in Scheveningen. This search was facilitated by one of the staff members there.

Similarly, I went to the Nationaal Archief (National Archives) in Den Haag (The Hague) with my sister Janny. We were assisted by a member of staff. The idea was that we did everything ourselves (i.e. find out what files we wanted and then ask for them). It was already a bother just trying to gain entry into the building. The woman must have realised that we were researching Jewish victims of the Nazis, and I suspected she herself was Jewish. She did all the digging and produced all the necessary files, so we could go to work. There was a deadline. All documents had to be handed back to the staff by 1600 hours. We were not finished by then, but she allowed us to continue, which we much appreciated. So I am very grateful for her assistance.

I also contacted the Red Cross Tracing Service in The Hague. At the time, it was still getting requests for information about people, who went missing during the war (and not just Dutch people!). Again, I was provided with a lot of files, so I could peruse them at leisure. I was even provided with a desk to use and could ask for more information while there. They even copied certain documents, so I could take them home. Although I am not a friend of the Red Cross, I must acknowledge the great help Drs M. Schwartzenberg provided.

The conservator of the former Westerbork transit camp, Mr Guido Abuys, has also been a great help. We exchanged information, because he was just as interested in finding out more about my father’s stay in Westerbork as I was. I provided him, for example, with copies of letters my father sent to my mother during that time, and he filled in certain details or answered questions I had. Thank you, Mr Abuys.

The German group Wege-gegen-das-Vergessen (Ways-against-the-Forgetting) had invited me to visit its members. It had organised a public gathering on 2 December 2010 to detail brief biographies of my father and grandmother. The next day they were to unveil some commemorative bronze plaques. These were to be cemented into the sidewalk in front of the house in Kohlscheid, where my father and grandparents had once lived. I had previously provided the group with a biography of the Goldsteen and Mendel families including sixty-five photographs, which they put up on their website.

They offered assistance, so I asked a lot of questions, in particular about visiting locations where my grandparents had lived and worked. Unfortunately, I was unable to travel overseas at such short notice; however, my sister, Janny, and her husband, Rob, were able to attend. Eventually, I was able to travel to Germany in June 2011, accompanied by my cousin Rachel and her husband Aryeh. Before my trip, Mrs Sofie Sequeira of nearby Übach-Palenberg, a member of this group, undertook all the necessary research. She took us to all the places of interest to us in Kohlscheid, Rheydt, and Aachen and provided us with newspaper clippings and a DVD of the TV broadcasts about our visit, which explained why we visited. She also gave me a lot of photos, documents and books that provided information about my grandparents and the high school my father and Uncle Carl attended. I am most grateful to Sofie for all the work she has done for us. It is unbelievable. Moreover, I remain in contact with her and have asked more questions, which she always gracefully investigated and answered.

After our visit, some researchers from different institutes contacted me. They sought permission to use some of my photos and obtain more information about the relatives of my grandmother Carolina Goldsteen-Mendel.

A very productive association was with Mr. Wil Brassé of Sittard (Limburg). He was a member of the team that was then producing a book about the former Jews of Geleen. He wanted more information as well. Once again I was surprised by the amount of information he had discovered that I had no knowledge of. Mind you this worked both ways, as I provided him with a lot of information and photos of other Jewish families in Geleen. He in turn was able to confirm information or find out more about the people in the photos. He still keeps me posted about any events that may be of interest to me and continues to answer any questions that arise. Thank you so much Wil for all that leg work you no doubt had to do to obtain everything needed for your book. I was particularly grateful for the newspaper advertisements you discovered, which advertised sales in the 1930s and as late as 1941 for my grandmother’s hat business in Geleen and Uncle Carl’s hat business in Sittard. In 2018, in collaboration with members of the Stichting Stolpersteine Sittard-Geleen and the local city councils he also managed to organise the placing of little monuments, called Stolpersteine, into a sidewalk. One was for my grandmother, to be placed in front of her former hat shop at Raadhuislaan 13 in Geleen. A second one was for my aunt Elfriede, to be placed in front of her former hat shop at Limbrichterstraat 64 in Sittard. In 2017, one had already been placed in front of the former radio shop of Uncle Frits at Annastraat 24 in Geleen in the presence of his daughter (my cousin) Rachel Herz-Goldsteen and her family.

My eldest Jewish grandchild, Adina Vered bat Daniel van der Plaat (Gentle Rose daughter of Daniel van der Plaat), had naturally learned about the Holocaust during her early teen years in the Jewish school she attended in Melbourne (Beth Rivkah Ladies College) and had interviewed me for a school project. She told me she was going to marry early so she could have children while I was still alive. This way, she hoped to make up for the loss of all my Jewish relatives who had been murdered. I was naturally very impressed and moved but said that was not necessary. After she graduated from Beth Rivka, she was keen to assist me and typed my English translations of the interviews I had recorded in Dutch. I listened to what was said and then translated it out loud, and she typed it. Her knowledge of Dutch is not fluent but was good enough that she regularly typed the translation before I said anything. She saved me a lot of time because, after fifty-six years of typing, I still use only two fingers. Moreover, if I was stuck for a suitable translation, she already found it on her smart-phone. She was thus not only multitasking but also very efficient at it. I am most grateful for her assistance. We have had a very close bond of mutual love and respect since she was a little girl.

The Mauthausen Memorial in Vienna (Austria), via the Austrian Ministry of Internal Affairs, provided me with copies of various documents related to what happened to my father after his arrival at this camp.

The Dutch Ministry of Defence provided quite useful information about my father’s military service.

Martin Sachs, a former Mauthausen inmate, who lives in Melbourne, related his experience and commented on my father’s oedema condition and probability of survival.

In The Hague, Amsterdam, Schiedam, Voorburg, and Geleen, the civil registry office staff kindly searched their records and supplied me with all kinds of information about my relatives. I could obviously no longer obtain this information directly because all the relatives from that era had deceased, so these offices have been a great help.

Almost all photos and documents are from the private collection of my late mother and late uncle Carl or from currently living relatives. I obtained permission to publish the few photos and documents that are from other sources. These are mentioned in the caption of the relevant photos of Südstraβe, Hauptstraβe, Rheydt address book, advertisements of the hat shops and the newspaper article about Carl’s car crash. Their copyrights have expired, because they are all well over 70 years old, so I did not mention the source of these photos.

My two daughters, Zerujah and Chavivah, carefully read the manuscript and suggested a number of improvements, which I gratefully accepted.

Finally, I wish to thank my wife, Lilian, for her patience during all these years in letting me spend so much time on this book. I left almost everything in her capable hands to ensure that our household continued to run smoothly.

I apologise to anyone whom I may have inadvertently left out.

Introduction

This book is primarily intended as a record of the history of a branch of the Goldsteen family.

My reason for writing it was brought on by the horrendous loss of lives of many Goldsteens. They were murdered by the German Nazi regime during the Holocaust perpetrated against the Jews of Europe in the period 1933 to 1945, when over six million of us were killed.

This loss meant that I have no recollection of my father, Alfred; my paternal grandmother, Carolina; or my uncle Frits and aunt Elfriede Goldsteen-Lebenstein. My father was the last one of all the relatives to be arrested and I was then almost 2 years old and too young to have any memories of him and the others. Because of the many restrictions put on the Jews in the Netherlands, specifically the prohibition to use public transport, I never met the others who were murdered. My paternal grandfather, George, after whom I am named, died of natural causes eight years before I was born.

During the late 1990s, I received a family tree from Jozef Jacobs, whose mother was a Goldsteen, and it was then that I discovered how many Goldsteen relatives were murdered by the Nazis. My late uncle Carl Goldsteen sent me information about the Mendel side of the family (i.e. my grandmother Carolina’s relatives).

The death of more than 95 relatives left an enormous gap in my life. I could not bear that I never knew these relatives, and I could not and still cannot understand why they had to be murdered.

My mother, the late Tine Janna Goldsteen-Hoen, told me many things about her life and her later experiences during the Second World War as did Uncle Carl. In 1983, she emigrated with us to Australia and lived just down the street from us. Naturally, I frequently visited her, and no matter what we talked about, we almost always ended up talking about the Holocaust. Neither she nor I could get these horrible events out of our minds.

Meanwhile, I had begun a correspondence with Uncle Carl to ask him numerous questions about my father’s and other relatives’ lives before the war. I finally was able to interview him on tape in 1985, which led to four and a half hours of stories. He later sent many emails in response to my further questions. I had more discussions when I visited him twice in Canada after his wife Phyllis passed away. At that time, his stepson, Geoffrey, permitted me to take any and all photos, letters, and other documents from Uncle Carl’s office as long as they were dated earlier than 1973, the year when Carl married his mother. Similarly, I interviewed my mother for about three and a half hours in 1997. I knew her answers to my questions, but I wanted to have a record so no one could dispute my text.

A few years before she passed away, she started to confuse things. I told her about the minor riots that had taken place in Amsterdam on New Year’s Eve of about 2006 or 2007. People had set fire to piles of car tyres and did similar acts of vandalism, which was a decades-long tradition. Her reaction: ‘This is the fault of the SS’. She was reliving the war again.

My mother kept all the letters and notes she received on the occasion of her marriage and on my and my sister Janny’s births as well as letters from my father. This included the letters he was able to send while in the German-operated transit camp in Westerbork. She also kept the official documents from the German authorities and the condolences from people she received after she notified them of my father’s passing. My mother had received confirmation of his death in July 1945. At that time, it was obvious from what people wrote to my mother that they still were not aware of the mass gassing and shooting of millions of Jews. They assumed he died from some disease, but some asked if my mother knew how he died. She did not find out more about that until January 1946, when an eyewitness wrote to her giving an account of my father’s last hour before his death. I have incorporated his testimony.

She also kept all the letters, notes, and photos from 1945 and before, all the way back to her own youth, as well as numerous official documents. Moreover, she also maintained three different diaries. Similarly, I obtained numerous photos of that same era from Uncle Carl. I have no idea how he managed to keep these. I can only assume he stored them with non-Jewish friends. He spent seven years in a sanatorium from 1939 until 1946, so he could not keep anything with him during that time.

Thanks to his phenomenal memory, he managed to fill in so much of the family’s history that it is unbelievable. This will explain why so much in this book is about him, even though it was originally meant to be primarily about my father. However, his experiences will provide information about the events in Europe that obviously affected my father as well, in particular in Germany, where Carl, my father, and their youngest brother, Frits, were born and grew up. They did not move to the Netherlands until 1924.

I began searching archives for more information in 1989, when I visited the former transit camp at Westerbork (in the Dutch province of Drenthe). It was from this camp that the Jews were taken by train mostly to the extermination camps at Auschwitz and Sobibor. A total of ninety-six trains transported over 105,000 Jews, of which sixty-five trains went to Auschwitz, nineteen to Sobibor, eight to Bergen-Belsen, six to Theresienstadt, two to Buchenwald, two to Ravensbrück and one each to Vittel and Liebenau (van Lakerveld, 2016). It is now called the Herinneringscentrum Kamp Westerbork (Remembrance Camp). It serves as a museum and preserves remnants of the original camp. There, I obtained several pages from a so-called Memor book on which were listed all deportees including the Goldsteens. Oddly, it listed Carl Goldsteen as ‘missing’ (besides listing his place of birth as Ochtrup in Germany, when he was born in Kohlscheid, his wife Elfriede was born in Ochtrup). I informed the conservator, Mr Abuys, that Carl was still alive and living in Canada and that I was flying over there the next day to visit him. This was the first indication that there can be errors even in official documents. Indeed, you will see that there were errors and that there are still uncertainties about some details of certain events involving my relatives.

In the early part of the twenty-first century, I visited the Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie in Amsterdam and the National Archives in The Hague to obtain more details about the relatives who were murdered.

Just before emigrating to Australia in June 1983, we visited the former Mauthausen concentration camp in an attempt to get a better idea of what it was like during the Holocaust. Of course, only camp prisoners could ever know what it was really like. That same night I had a horrible nightmare about the Holocaust, clearly a result of my visit. In 2005, I visited Mauthausen again and its former satellite camp at Gusen about 5 km away. I used the time there to investigate further and later also obtained details of my father’s time in the camp from the Mauthausen Memorial Archives in Vienna.

In 2011, my cousin Rachel; her husband, Aryeh; and I were honoured guests of the Herzogenrath City Council in Germany (which incorporated Kohlscheid). The working group Wege-gegen-das-Vergessen (Ways-against-the-Forgetting) had organised this. It also organised media coverage and our touring around to visit the locations of former Goldsteen businesses (all destroyed by Allied bombing raids), the homes they lived in, and the schools attended by the boys. (Germans destroyed their Jewish school during the Night of Broken Glass pogrom in November 1938.)

The next day, we drove ourselves to Vaals and Geleen in the Netherlands for the same purpose. There, everything was still standing except George Goldsteen’s former currency exchange office, which unfortunately had just been demolished that morning.

Meanwhile, during the 1990s, a distant relative, Jozef Jacobs (a.k.a. Joop Jacobs), did an enormous amount of research to enable him to construct a Goldsteen family tree. (Joop’s mother descended from Hartog Barend Goldsteen, brother of Israel Barend Goldsteen, from whom I descend.) His work and the information I obtained from my uncle Carl Goldsteen enabled me to incorporate some details of the Goldsteen family from its earliest settlement in the Netherlands onwards.

When Joop researched our family tree, he regularly came across different spellings of people’s names. It is likely that these differences were introduced by the officials who entered the names in the civil registries. These registries were established when Napoleon Bonaparte enacted his civil code in 1811 after he had annexed the Netherlands. When I grew up we could always tell what city or region a person came from by their accent. For example, in The Hague, my home town, there were even three different accents. These have probably largely disappeared as a result of television and people having become more mobile due to large internal migrations. Different dialects were spoken in the Netherlands, and thus, the pronunciation of words and names varied. This probably led to the different spellings. Besides these differences in names, there are also some different birth dates, probably caused by people being uncertain of them. However, as Joop cross-checked the names, he could usually determine the correct identity of each person in the archives he consulted.

Moreover, members of the Goldsteen family were born in different locations and often moved residence. So Joop contacted the civil registries in all those towns to discover when people were born and at what addresses they had lived. He also managed to determine what profession they were engaged in, whom they married, and so on.

From his work, we now have a good idea of who is who and where the Goldsteen family came from.

Although I would never dream of addressing my parents, aunts, and uncles by their first names, I am using these in this book to avoid confusion. For example, who is Oma Goldsteen? (Oma is the affectionate address for a Dutch grandmother.) Is it Carolina Goldsteen-Mendel, my oma, or is it Tine Goldsteen-Hoen, who was the oma of my children? I may use their names in relation to some other person, such as when Carolina is not that person’s oma, but an aunt or just a friend. Many years from now, someone who reads about Oma Keila (Carolina’s Hebrew name), might think erroneously that she is my granddaughter Keila. However, im yirtzeh HaShem (with G-d’s help), she may be an oma herself by then.

From time to time, I use Hebrew, Yiddish, Dutch, or German words or abbreviations. These are translated into English only the first time they appear in the text. However, there is a separate glossary of all these words so one can always check immediately instead of having to flick back to find that first translation (see Appendix J).

Most of my text is based on stories my mother and uncle Carl told me. It was sometimes difficult to decide whether to use ‘I’ when it was me talking and to use ‘Carl’ when he was talking because it might lead to confusion about who was actually talking. Therefore, when someone else is the narrator I indented their text. However, sometimes, I identified the name of the narrator.

You may not be familiar with the history of that era or with the circumstances under which people lived or with other unfamiliar terms. Therefore, from time to time, I inserted some explanatory texts. These appear in parentheses, as do my translations. However, when I inserted these in someone else’s narrative, they are inside square brackets.

After the Second World War, the spelling rules for the Dutch language were modernised several times. However, I have preserved the pre-war spelling of Dutch names for cities and streets. In some cases this will mean they cannot be found on a modern map unless one is familiar with the current spelling.

Chapter 1

The Early History of the Goldsteen Family

Barend Goldsteen (Goudstein) was born in around 1730 in Bamberg in the then kingdom of Bayern (Bavaria).

At that time there was not a country called Germany. The entire area that eventually became Germany consisted of small kingdoms and duchies. Otto von Bismarck unified these in 1871, and they then became collectively known as Germany. Barend married Klaartje (Clara). We do not know her family name. They had two sons, Hartog Barend and Israel Barend.

Hartog Barend Goldsteen (b. 3 Oct.1758, Bamberg) was a.k.a. Goudsteen and Goudstein. He must have migrated to the town of Staphorst in the Netherlands in the period before 1793 because, in that year, his firstborn, Salomon Hartog, was born there on 12 January 1793. Staphorst lies 93 km north-easterly of Amsterdam. During the period 1800–1803, he moved to the town of Meppel in the province of Drenthe. Meppel lies 95 km north-east of Amsterdam (see Appendix K for a map of the Netherlands and Germany). Hartog Barend was a painter-glazier. As we found out later that other descendants of the Goldsteens were painting artists, it is assumed that Hartog Barend also was an artist.

Israel Barend Goldsteen (b. 16 Jan. 1778, Bamberg) was a.k.a. Goudsteen. In 1803, he migrated to Meppel. Israel Barend was a painter-glazier as well. He passed away in Meppel on 14 May 1842 at age 64. However, his death certificate claims he was 73 when he passed away. If that was correct, he would have been born in 1769. This appears more realistic, considering the birth date of his elder brother, because otherwise there would have been an unrealistically large age difference, especially since Barend and Klaartje had only two children. The initial information made him twenty years younger than Hartog Barend and now it would be much less at eleven years.

The original spelling of Barend’s family name was likely Goldstein, which is the common spelling even today and is, of course, the proper spelling in German, the language spoken in Bavaria. The spellings ‘goud’ and ‘steen’ are simply the Dutch spelling and have the same meaning.

Apparently Hartog Barend tried to register it as more of a Dutch version, but then he should have changed it to the correct translation, Goudsteen. Indeed, later on, some official spelled it that way. At other times, it was spelled the German way again. It is entirely possible that he did not change it at all but that the registrar of names misunderstood him. This happened a lot to Jews, who emigrated from (mostly Eastern) Europe to the USA in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

An acquaintance of mine is called Steve Solomon. His family name sounds like a perfect Jewish name. However, his paternal grandfather’s name was actually Zalman when he entered the USA. The American official was obviously not familiar with non-English names and recorded what he heard, so the family name was changed from then on to Solomon. (In German, the letter Z is pronounced as ‘Ts’ and Zal means ’number’ in Yiddish; in other words, a Zalman was a numbers man, which is a bookkeeper. Solomon comes from the Hebrew Shlomo or Sholom, meaning ‘whole/peace’)

I do not know whether Barend Goldsteen migrated to the Netherlands. His alternative spelling was found by Joop Jacobs, so Barend may have settled in Meppel as well.

You may well ask, ‘Why settle in Meppel? Didn’t Jews just live in Amsterdam?’ Historically, Amsterdam certainly had the largest concentration of Jews. Many Jews who were expelled or fled from Spain and Portugal during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century started to settle in Amsterdam. It was the economic hub of the country, and they knew they would not be persecuted for their religion. When eventually Jews from Eastern Europe started to settle in the Netherlands, they naturally wanted to live among fellow Jews for various reasons. This caused a solid growth of the Jewish community in Amsterdam. Over time, however, Jews settled in different parts of the Netherlands, and there were many towns with a Jewish community. The Jews in the town of Meppel were so much a part of the community that there was a saying that one of Meppel’s draw-bridges spoke Yiddish.

I obtained the following information about Meppel from the book ‘Opkomst en ondergang van een toonaangevende joodse gemeente’ by Dr S.C. Derksen (1988).

It describes how Meppel during the nineteenth century had a thriving Jewish community, which varied between 600 and 750 souls. It was one of the ten largest Jewish communities in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, beginning in the twentieth century, the population started to dwindle; and by 1939, on the eve of World War II, there were only 267 left. However, the remaining Jews of Meppel were almost completely wiped out by Nazi Germany. In Auschwitz, 186 were murdered, 10 in Sobibor, and 22 elsewhere in various locations. There were thirty survivors; of these, twenty-eight had been in hiding and two had returned from the concentration camp in Theresienstadt. Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940, a year after the last tally of Jews in Meppel was known. So the remaining nineteen Jews must have been able to leave between 1939 and the time it had become virtually impossible to leave the Netherlands and find a safe haven.

The book showed me a good example of how Dutch authorities collaborated with the German authorities.

Its city council had rather ambitious members and a just as ambitious police force. They did not even consider sabotaging the German orders. Then the head of the local Joodsche Raad (Jewish Council established by the Germans, but see later about the Jewish council in Amsterdam) had much influence on not only the Jews but also on the general population. He recommended to his people to accede to the German orders. He even forbade one of his sons to go into hiding, but the son ignored that, and as a result, he survived. When the Jewish Council of Amsterdam informed him that all registered Jews would be collected from Meppel the next night, he did not warn anyone. (This council was held responsible for implementing any and all German decrees under threat of deportation if it did not obey them. In any event, regardless of their cooperation, all its members were eventually also deported as were those of the regional Jewish councils.) Over 170 Jews were transported to Westerbork. This took place on the day of Simchat Torah (Rejoicing of the Torah, the Torah contains the five books of Moses, a.k.a. the Pentateuch). Not one German was necessary to carry out this order! The local police, officers of the Marechaussee (military police), and the state police did it. After this incident these representatives of the law were very helpful with the hunting down of Jews who had escaped from Westerbork. In all, 218 Meppel Jews were murdered; but after the war, the local newspaper did not mention one word about this fact. (I used Meppel as an example because the Goldsteen ancestors settled in Meppel, and a number of them were still living in Meppel during the war and perished.) Before the war the number of Goldsteens there was large.

As I descend from Israel Barend’s line, I will only detail his descendants leading to me. Details of all the descendants of the original Barend Goldsteen can be explored in the family tree enclosed near the end of this book in Appendix F.

However, for easy identification of my relationships to those who play a role in this book, here is a brief overview:

Abraham Goldsteen was my great-grandfather, George Goldsteen grandfather, Carolina Goldsteen née Mendel grandmother, Alfred Goldsteen my father, Tine Goldsteen née Hoen my mother, Carl Goldsteen (Alfred’s brother) uncle, Frits Goldsteen