Almost three years ago, when writing about the death of Zigi Shipper, I lamented on the sinking feeling of receiving an email informing recipients that another Holocaust survivor has died. So it was yesterday evening, when I checked my phone’s notifications and saw a new email simply titled ‘Manfred Goldberg MBE’.
Manfred was born in Kassel, Germany, on 21 April 1930, to Orthodox Jewish parents Baruch and Rosa Goldberg. His younger brother Hermann arrived four years later. The family led a peaceful life in the town, until the Nazis came to power and the escalating persecution of German Jews took effect. A few days before the November Pogrom (or Kristallnacht) in 1938, a local non-Jewish police officer warned Baruch to hide, further dispelling the myth that the pogrom was a wholly spontaneous act of violence. Kassel’s beautiful synagogue, a short walk from the family home, was destroyed; Manfred and other Jewish children were set to work collecting the rubble.
In August 1939, facing the threat of incarceration in a concentration camp, Baruch managed to emigrate to England. The hope was that Rosa and the children would join him shortly afterwards. Instead, the outbreak of the Second World War the following month scuppered their plans, and Rosa, Manfred and Hermann were trapped. After two long years of increasing segregation, identification and restriction, on 9 December 1941 the Goldbergs were deported from Kassel to the Riga Ghetto. Manfred remembered arriving in his allocated housing to see unfinished plates of food on the table. The previous inhabitants, along with thousands of others in the ghetto, had been swiftly rounded up and massacred in the Rumbula Forest the day before to make room for the incoming German Jews.
Manfred and Hermann, then aged 11 and seven respectively, were too young to be put to work. Instead, they played together and Manfred read to Hermann; his younger brother had never received a proper education due to the expulsion of Jewish pupils from German schools. In the ghetto, before his 13th birthday, Manfred also had his Bar Mitzvah, performed in secret with an old Torah scroll and 10 men present.
Once he turned 13, Manfred was considered old enough to undertake slave labour. The family were moved to the Preču labour camp, where Manfred repaired bombed-out railway lines. One day, Manfred and his mother Rosa returned from work to discover Hermann was missing. He and three other children had been taken by the Nazis, never to be seen again. Manfred never found out exactly what happened to the younger brother he loved and looked after so dearly.
In 1946, after recovering from typhus and tuberculosis, Manfred and Rosa travelled to England and were reunited with Baruch. There was relief that the three of them had survived, yet immense grief over the loss of Hermann. Manfred was determined to rebuild his life. He began by making up for his lost education and obtained a degree in engineering. He reconnected with Zigi in England, and the two were firm friends until Zigi’s death in January 2023. In 1961, Manfred married his wife Shary, though the wedding was bittersweet as Rosa died only 10 days before the ceremony. The couple had four sons, several grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Manfred was made an MBE by the King only two months ago, for services to Holocaust remembrance and education.
Later in life, Manfred began talking about his experiences publicly, particularly for the Holocaust Educational Trust. In 2017, he and Zigi accompanied Prince William and Princess Catherine on a tour of the Stutthof Memorial; more recently, Manfred was one of seven survivors whose portrait was commissioned by King Charles, explored in the BBC documentary Survivors: Portraits of the Holocaust. Perhaps Manfred’s most poignant journey, however, was back to Kassel in 2018, to finally publicly acknowledge Hermann’s death by laying a Stolperstein (‘stumbling’ memorial stone) for him and reciting the Jewish memorial prayer for the dead. This was captured in The Last Survivors, a clip of which can be watched here.
I first met Manfred – virtually – in 2021. The Holocaust and Genocide Research Partnership was forced to launch its inaugural exhibition, Death Marches: Evidence and Memory, online due to the pandemic. Manfred agreed to deliver a presentation primarily about his death march experience. A few of us joined Manfred on Zoom the day before, to check the technology was working and run through the plan for the event. Our chair, Professor Dan Stone, asked if Manfred could give a brief summary of his story. Eloquently and calmly, in a softly spoken voice, Manfred kept us enraptured and close to tears for the next thirty minutes, particularly when speaking about Hermann’s disappearance.
Catching Covid later that year robbed me of the chance to meet Manfred when he was invited to view the physical exhibition once it finally opened (under regulations of social distancing and wearing face masks). Finally, I spent a few moments with him at the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Ambassador Conference in 2023. When I explained who I was, he broke into a huge smile, took my face in his hands and simply said, “Bless you. Thank you.” He was, in short, the gentlest of gentlemen, despite all the suffering he had experienced.
I had the further privilege of working with Manfred’s testimony in depth whilst developing the Trust’s new programme Testimony 360: People and Places of the Holocaust later that year. Along with three other survivors, Manfred had been recorded using specialist cameras over the course of a week, answering around 1,000 questions about his life, to be transformed into an Interactive Testimony for use in the classroom. He was extremely proud to be involved with the project, and delighted to join the official launch at a school in April 2024. As Manfred himself said, “This Testimony 360 process enables people to have conversations with me long after I’ve left this world.”
Inevitably, but sadly, that time has now come. It is my strong hope that Manfred is now reunited somewhere with Zigi, his parents, and Hermann, the beloved little brother whom he last saw 82 years ago.
