World War II veteran Sol Goldstein spoke at Hillel on Sunday as one of several events planned to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The 88-year-old Jewish-American fought in vital American battles during the war, but his part in the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp was the main reason for his selection as a speaker for the memorial day.
“These are our people, and hearing the story of someone seeing their own people being treated like this definitely had an impact . . . that makes it that much stronger,” Hillel Education Chair and head of the event Dina Green said.
Goldstein grew up in Baltimore and enlisted in the army at the age of 17. He emphasized the age of both himself and other soldiers with repeated usage of the word “kids” in his reference to other soldiers in his retelling of events.
“You would expect to be moved from a Holocaust survivor, but since it was from a different perspective, it was also very real,” Green said. “I felt like it was a grandfather telling his children a story. It was very impassioned and very personal.”
Goldstein related specific events that he experienced to his Jewish background, and spoke of the discrimination he faced not only from Germans abroad, but also from his fellow soldiers. Although he felt anti-Semitism from some, he also formed close relationships, despite the constant shadow of death that surrounded his comrades. He lost 40 percent of his platoon before D-Day and many others died of cold-related causes during the Battle of the Bulge.
After his service in the Battle of the Bulge, Goldstein moved north. He and his men came across what he thought was a POW camp but was actually a Buchenwald, a concentration camp. He and the others knew nothing of concentration camps, and Goldstein related his horror in seeing what he described as “walking dead,” and his first communication with a 4-foot-tall Jewish man imprisoned in the camp in Yiddish. The man asked Goldstein what took him so long to get there.
“There was not a single dry eye in the room,” Green said.
Goldstein had troubles after the war with a bout of alcoholism, but after meeting his future wife he turned over a new leaf and vowed to help needy Jews for the rest of his life. One such endeavor was in 1982, in which he helped transport persecuted Jewish refugees from Ethiopia to Sudan and other locations.
“Even when he was talking about his personal life afterward and how it was affecting him — that definitely hit home; that aftermath, which is still what we’re living in,” Green said.
Goldstein partly told his story as a counter to Revisionists — those who do not believe that the Holocaust actually occurred and sometimes question his retelling of the events.
“Trust me, it happened. I wish it hadn’t, but it did,” Goldstein said.
