Manfred Goldberg

Manfred was born in April 1930 in Kassel in central Germany. His parents were both originally from Poland and came from deeply religious Jewish families. His father Baruch (Benno) had studied in a yeshiva from the ages of fourteen to eighteen before leaving Poland due to rising antisemitism and the threat of conscription into the Polish army. He fled to Germany around the end of the First World War and settled in Kassel, where a small community of Polish-Jewish refugees had begun to form. Manfred’s mother Rosa née Seemann also migrated to Germany and eventually met his father through community connections. They married in 1927 and established their home in Kassel where both Manfred and his younger brother Hermann (1934) were born.

Manfred describes how his father established himself economically despite arriving in Germany with little money. Through assistance from other members of the Polish-Jewish community, he obtained textile goods from a Jewish wholesaler on credit and travelled around nearby towns selling items such as tablecloths, bedding, and clothing. The Goldberg family lived in relatively modest accommodation in Kassel, initially on Bremer Straße and later in an apartment building on Müllergasse. Although the building housed both Jewish and non-Jewish residents, Manfred recalls little open hostility from neighbours in the early years. One neighbour in particular, a civil policeman named Herr Dilling, maintained cordial relations with his father and even became a customer. This relationship later proved significant, as Dilling discreetly warned Manfred’s father shortly before Kristallnacht in 1938, advising him to disappear temporarily. Acting on this advice, his father avoided arrest during the mass detention of Jewish men following the pogrom.

He and his family suffered escalating persecution in Germany under the Nazi regime in the years before the Second World War. Manfred’s father Baruch (Benno) was able to escape to Britain in August 1939, just days before the war began, but the rest of the family were unable to join him. The situation deteriorated following the outbreak of the war and in 1940 Manfred’s Jewish school was closed by the Nazi authorities.

In December 1941, Manfred, his mother Rosa and younger brother Hermann were deported by train from Germany to the Riga Ghetto in Latvia. Life in the ghetto was characterised by lack of food, use as slave labour and constant fear: throughout Manfred’s time in the ghetto, the Nazis and their Latvian collaborators regularly selected inmates of the ghetto for mass shootings in forests on the edge of the city. Despite this, Manfred was able to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah in March 1943.

In August 1943, just three months before the ghetto was finally liquidated, Manfred was sent to a nearby labour camp (Precu) where he was forced to work laying railway tracks. One day, when he came back from slave labour, his little brother had disappeared and he never saw him again. As the Red Army approached Riga, Manfred, his mother and the other surviving prisoners were evacuated to Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig (today Gdańsk in Poland) in August 1944. He spent more than eight months as a slave worker in Stutthof and its subcamps, including Stolp and Burggraben. The camp was abandoned just days before the war ended and Manfred and other prisoners were sent on a death march in appalling conditions. Manfred and his mother were finally liberated at Neustadt in Germany on 3 May 1945.

Manfred and his mother came to Britain in September 1946 to be reunited with his father. After learning English, he managed to catch up on some of his missed education and he eventually graduated from London University with a degree in Electronics. He married Shary and they had four sons.

Keywords: Goldberg. Seemann. Kassel. Riga. Precu. Stutthof. Stolp. Burggraben.