Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on March 30, 2024

Helma Goldmark, an Austrian-born Jew, turned 12 in 1938, the year it became evident that she was no longer safe in her homeland.

In March, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in an event known as the Anschluss. In November, during the antisemitic rampaging of Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, SS officers abducted her father from his bed at their home in Graz. They took him to the local Jewish cemetery and beat him, knocking all the teeth from his mouth, breaking both his legs and leaving him facedown in a creek, the imprint of their boots still visible on his body. He lay there in agony until a passing milkman carried him home on a horse-drawn cart.

Mrs. Goldmark had lost her mother to cancer before the Anschluss, and her only sibling, a sister 19 years her senior, lived in Italy. With her father and then alone, after he was taken to a concentration camp and murdered she set out on a perilous journey that took her to fascist Croatia and Nazi-occupied Rome. As a teenager on her own in the Italian capital, she joined a resistance cell that aided Jews by furnishing them with false documents and ration cards.

Mrs. Goldmark, who moved after World War II to the United States, where she used her prodigious language skills to assist fellow immigrants as a paralegal, died March 15 at an assisted-living center in Bethesda, Md. She was 98. The cause was cerebrovascular disease, said her daughter, Susan Goldmark.

Mrs. Goldmarks Holocaust survival story was documented in the 2010 book Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, a memoir by her son-in-law, Kai Bird, who is also the co-author of American Prometheus (2005), the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

She was born Helma Blhweis in Graz, the second-largest city in Austria, on Feb. 8, 1926. Her father, Alois, who was Jewish, ran a tannery, leather factory and leather store. Her mother, the former Hermine Jassniger, a Catholic who converted to Judaism, was an accomplished pianist.

Helma and her parents lived in an elegant apartment above her fathers store and enjoyed the services of a cook, a housekeeper, a nanny and a chauffeur. They attended religious services only on the High Holy Days and felt entirely integrated into Austrian society, Mrs. Goldmark recalled.

But immediately after the Anschluss, her teacher instructed students that instead of saying good morning at the start of class, they would raise their right hand and make the Heil Hitler salute.

She then turned to me and said that I was not allowed to say Heil Hitler and would be barred from attending school starting immediately, Mrs. Goldmark wrote in an account provided to the Austrian Heritage Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. That was the last day I attended regular school in Graz.

Later that year, a member of the Nazi Party claimed ownership of her fathers business, as well as the family home, but permitted Helma and her father to sleep in the kitchen pantry.

Her father resolved to leave Austria but, having been stripped of his livelihood, lacked the funds to cover the exit fee charged by the Nazi regime. He went to the man who had confiscated his home and business and, at gunpoint, signed away all his property in exchange for enough money to cover the cost of leaving, Bird wrote.

In January 1939, Helma and her father left Austria for Yugoslavia, where his brother was publisher of a newspaper in the Croatian city of Zagreb. They made part of the journey by train and part by foot, with Helmas father, still suffering from the injuries he sustained on Kristallnacht, hobbling on crutches over a snowy no mans land at the border.

They enjoyed relative safety until April 1941, when the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia and a Nazi puppet government was established in Croatia under Ante Pavelic, leader of the fascist Ustasha regime.

As conditions deteriorated for Jews, Mrs. Goldmarks father began making plans to flee to Italy and then send for his daughter.

To celebrate her 16th birthday on Feb. 8, 1942, he delayed his departure until the following morning. Two hours before the train left, Bird wrote, the Ustasha arrested him. He was taken to the Jasenovac concentration camp south of Zagreb, where, a survivor later told Mrs. Goldmark, he was bludgeoned to death by Ustasha guards.

Mrs. Goldmark soon left for Italy, where she lived for a period in Bressanone, a town in the German-speaking north, with her sister and brother-in-law, an Italian agricultural inspector who belonged to the fascist party.

Made to feel that her presence was a burden, Bird wrote, and warned by her sister that she was in danger of deportation, she left in August 1943. She began traveling south, at times walking alone through the Italian countryside, and arrived in Rome days before the Germans occupied the city that September.

Finding shelter in Catholic convents and with fellow Jewish refugees, she managed to avoid arrest, even amid the infamous roundup of Roman Jews that took place Oct. 16, 1943.

In early 1944, she met a Jewish man who introduced himself as Giuseppe Levi. Noting her blond hair and blue eyes features that might allow her to pass as an Aryan he recruited her to a resistance operation led by Pierre-Marie Benoit, a French priest who had overseen the printing of thousands of false papers for Jews in France before undertaking similar work in Rome.

I was stupid enough to say yes, Mrs. Goldmark told Bird. I just thought it was an adventure.

Under the alias Elena Bianchi, Mrs. Goldmark, then 17, obtained a job as a clerical worker at a Luftwaffe command post. When a German lieutenant confided in her that he wished to desert, she carried out a trade: civilian clothes and a safe apartment for him in exchange for German letterhead, stamps and seals for the forgery operation.

As the Allies advanced from Southern Italy, she feigned a broken leg to avoid moving north with her Luftwaffe office and remained in Rome until the city was liberated in June 1944.

We couldnt believe that this was the end, Bird quoted her as saying. That evening was the first and last time that I got drunk. We feasted on a bottle of wine.

In 1966, Benoit was recognized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor bestowed on Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis.

After the liberation of Rome, Mrs. Goldmark worked for the American military government as a translator and later for the American Joint Distribution Committee.

She immigrated in 1947 to the United States, where she changed her maiden name to Bliss, and where she married Victor Willy Goldmark, a Viennese Holocaust survivor she had met in Rome. Their marriage ended in divorce.

Besides her daughter, of Washington, Manhattan and Miami Beach, survivors include a grandson.

Mrs. Goldmark lived for decades in New York before moving in 1991 to the Washington area. Until late in her life, she worked in legal offices translating documents from German, Serbo-Croatian, Italian, French and Spanish.

Long after she came to the United States, she kept in her closet a suitcase whether packed or simply ready to be packed in the event that she would need to flee. It was, her son-in-law observed, a symbol of her trauma.

See the rest here:

Helma Goldmark, Holocaust refugee who joined resistance, dies at 98 - The Washington Post

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