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In 1936, a curious Jewish teenager named Yocheved Gold slipped into Berlin’s Olympic Stadium to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Nazi Germany. With dark blond hair and blue eyes, she did not arouse suspicion and was asked to join other children presenting flowers to Adolf Hitler. “I saw him face to face and was a little afraid,” she later recalled. “That I, a Jew, would give Hitler flowers? I refused.”
Gold, who died this month at 102, was born in 1923 in Halberstadt, Germany, to Sarah (née Bamberger), a descendant of prominent 19th-century German rabbis, and Rabbi Dr Aharon Neuwirth. The family moved to Berlin when she was seven.
Three years later, after the Nazis rose to power, she encountered antisemitism for the first time. She later described walking with her mother to synagogue and seeing shop windows smashed and marked with the word “JUDEN.”
She witnessed the destruction of synagogues during Kristallnacht in 1938, including in Bad Kissingen, where her grandmother lived. In 1939, at age 16, she immigrated to Mandatory Palestine aboard the ship Galileo, sailing to Haifa. During the voyage she assisted passengers who became ill – an early expression of the caregiving instinct that would define her life.
Her parents remained in Europe. They corresponded until the final year of World War II, when contact ceased. “I was sure they had been killed,” she said years later.
A letter from the Red Cross eventually confirmed they were alive. Within the family, their survival was remembered as a series of near-miraculous escapes. “They had already been taken to a camp, but managed to get out thanks to the Hungarian consul,” she said.
Haaretz
