Freda Goodman was touring the childhood home of Elie Wiesel back in May when she learned he was ill, and even then her heart filled with sadness.
The Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner had long been the thread linking Goodman to her own story, the one her mother, Gisela Gren Silberminz, owned but could never quite bring herself to share in any detail.
Then one day in 1977, during a visit with her family in Baltimore, Goodman spotted a copy of Wiesel’s “Night,” an autobiographical account of his experience in the Nazi death camps. She wondered why her mother, a survivor of the Holocaust, had this account; after all, her mother had avoided any books on the subject.
“Elie Wiesel is from my hometown, Sighet,” her mother explained.
Goodman, in her 20s at the time, asked to borrow the book and read it on the plane back home to Sandy Springs.
“I learned the horrors of my mother’s trauma from Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical account because my mother was on those same trains, in barracks at Birkenau, and on the death march,” she said.
It is how we all found out about the enormity of what happened in those concentration camps, but for Goodman, it is also why she has “always felt this really profound connection” to Wiesel.
And so on Saturday, when she and the rest of us learned Wiesel had died, Goodman cried as if she had lost a family member.
“We’d just been to his house in May,” she said. “I asked our tour guide if he were planning another visit there soon and she said no, he was ailing.”
Now he was gone. A feeling of great loss enveloped Goodman.
“I really feel it’s the last of the survivors now,” Goodman’s sister Helen Silberminz texted her.
Silberminz made the trip with Goodman to Sighet, Romania, after spending two weeks in Poland, where the two of them traced the footsteps of their father, Israel Silberminz, a survivor from Sosnowiec, Poland. They journeyed to Auschwitz and Birkenau, the place where so many of their parents’ family members were murdered.
As they navigated the Carpathian Mountains to Sighet, Goodman couldn’t help but wonder about the insanity that drove the Nazis and their Hungarian Arrow Cross collaborators to find their way to such a remote place and gather every last Jew for extermination.
“What madness drove them to divert trains and resources from the war effort to gather these hardworking and industrious people? Could they not have left my mother, her family, the Wiesels, and the 10,000 other Jewish residents of Sighet to live their lives out?”
Goodman, like most of us, may never know the answers to those questions. All she knows for sure is that her mother married, had children, had a full life, but never forgot the family she lost, and never stopped having nightmares.
Like Wiesel, Gisela’s life in the picturesque town of Sighet, Marmeres (now Romania), was interrupted in the spring of 1944, when German troops invaded Hungary and Jews were rounded up, confined to four ghettos and then deported to Auschwitz by rail in cattle cars, a journey that took three days.
In the chaos of arrival and the selection process, Gisela, then 15, tried to stay with her mother and her three youngest siblings, but someone grabbed her and her older sister and told them not to go, and to say they were 18.
After Gisela’s and Eta’s heads were shaved and they were issued a dress and shoes, the girls were assigned to Birkenau II C Block 22 and later transferred to a satellite labor camp in Buchenwald. Records show that on Oct. 17, 1944, they were checked into Gelsenkirchen camp, where they worked making uniforms and war materials. They were liberated by Russian soldiers wearing the same dress and shoes on May 8, 1945.
But much of the details of that time eluded Goodman until that day on the plane when she read for the first time Wiesel's "Night." For her, Wiesel wasn't just the witness for the 6 million Jews slaughtered in World War II, he was the moral voice against violence all over the world.
As such, he spoke out against the Cambodian and Bosnian genocides, the Sudan and Syrian wars and other atrocities.
“I know his heart was broken every time, as is mine and every other son or daughter of Holocaust survivors,” Goodman said.
His voice now silent, Goodman said it’s become even more important for the rest of us to open our eyes and hearts and see, for instance, the millions of mothers and fathers and children displaced by wars around the world.
“If they cannot return to their former homes, they need a safe place to restart their lives,” she said.
Goodman is hopeful.
“Elie Wiesel’s words will live for generations to come,” she said. “I just hope that those generations will continue to strive for the world of which Elie Wiesel, my parents and the survivors dreamed.”
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