Eva Goldstein

* 1921

  • “Germans had run away several days before the end and they handed the ghetto over to the Red Cross. Probably on May 8th ,we already heard the shooting of cannons in Litoměřice before. And then on one day the large gate in Terezín exploded and a Russian tank with a cannon and a red star arrived there. Of course, we were so joyful. We all began singing The Internationale and Where Is My Home. But then they closed Terezín, because there was typhoid. Quarantine was imposed and we were not allowed to go out. But since I knew the place well, I got out and on the same day I went by train to Prague.”

  • “Then we went to board the transport. It was the last large transport from Prague, because later there were almost no Jews left. We all had one big rucksack and each of us held another large bag in his hand. It was in the Trade Fair Palace. It began in the Trade Fair Palace. They constructed toilets there, but what they did was that they just placed some wooden planks with holes there, and there was one hole next to another, it was not partitioned at all, and so people had to sit one next to another. We started laughing hysterically. What else were we to do…?”

  • “Then I became sick. There was an epidemic of diphtheria and I suddenly contracted high fever. Mom carried me to hospital in a kind of a wheelchair, and they gave me some injections there. My sister Edita was saved thanks to diphtheria. They wanted to send her onward to Poland, but the doctors said: Mrs. Steinerová’s disease is still contagious. Mrs. Steinerová cannot travel. Obviously, people with contagious diseases could not go to Auschwitz. And so they left her there.”

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    Kibuc HaOgen, 21.01.2015

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    duration: 01:53:45
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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Europe became the grave of our nation. We went to Israel

33051-photo.jpg (historic)
Eva Goldstein

Eva Goldstein, née Hahnová, was born February 26, 1921 in a Jewish family in Prague. She had two sisters - Edita, who is four years older, and Eva’s twin Věra. Her father was a successful businessman who came from the village Skřivany in the Polabí area, and her mother came from Dolní Jiřetín near Most in the Sudeten region. Both languages were spoken at home: Eva’s mother spoke German and her father Czech. Eva was one of the founders of the Zionist movement El Al. In 1939 she wanted to leave the country and go abroad with Jan Kaufmann, her husband-to-be, but they were late: the authorities confiscated their passports. Věra was the only one from the family who managed to stay safe since she had left a bit earlier. Eva spent the year 1940 with a group of Zionist Jews on a farm near Rakovník where she was working hard in the fields and preparing herself for the tough life in Palestine, the land of her dreams. Then she worked in a Jewish clothes repair workshop until her transport in September 1943. Her job as a seamstress saved her from being transported to Auschwitz, because while she was in Terezín, Germans employed her in a workshop where she was repairing army uniforms. After the war, Eva got reunited only with her sister Edita in Prague. Edita had survived Auschwitz and a death march. Her husband and her entire family had died in concentration camps. Eva married David Goldstein and in 1947 she emigrated with him to present-day Israel, using forged documents. She still lives in Israel in kibbutz Ha-Ogen. Her twin sister Věra lives in Israel and her sister Edita settled in Chile.