HOME
My original idea was to write a book about my father, Alfred Goldsteen. I possess numerous photos, documents and correspondence, but mostly I had to rely on what my mother told me over the years. Naturally, she was not able to tell me much about Alfred’s life before their marriage. Fortunately, his younger brother Carl survived the Holocaust and had a phenomenal memory, so I interviewed him a number of times. I later interviewed my mother, who lived just down the street from us in Launceston. So there was a taped record of both their testimonies. Of course, once we were living in Tasmania, Carl and I corresponded by email to answer my many additional questions. A few years before his passing and after his wife Phyllis passed away, I visited him twice in Canada and obtained much more information that I could use.
Carl spoke mostly of his own experiences and gave me the diaries he had kept during the war from April 1943 until late 1945. Therefore I decided that this book should be about Alfred and Carl as well as some other close relatives. The main reason for my writing this book is to compile a record of the lives of my close relatives. They went through the Second World War, when most of them were murdered by the German Nazi regime and its collaborators. The book starts with the background of the Goldsteen family that came from Bavaria in the late eighteenth century. It then continues with the description of the lives of my grandparents George Goldsteen and Carolina Mendel and their descendants until just after the end of the Second World War. However, I do relate some events and comments that concern a later period.
My current relatives would never be able to acquaint themselves with our family history before the end of this war in May 1945, unless I wrote this book. Even so, after my mother and Carl passed away, I slowly began to realise there were still many questions I should have asked, but they never occurred to me until it was too late.
On my mother’s side of the family no one was Jewish. They suffered hunger during the last winter of the war, when many thousands of Dutch non-Jewish people starved to death. Thankfully, all of my mother’s blood relatives, their spouses and children survived.
It is because of the horrible things that were perpetrated against the Jews that I felt this book should only be about the Jewish side of my family of whom more than 95 were murdered (see list of names in Appendix E). Naturally, my mother is featured as she played a major role and suffered the loss of her husband, a loss she never recovered from. She had kept three different diaries during the war, which also gave me insights in what she was thinking and how she was feeling and coping.
I was 74 years old when I originally wrote this foreword and have waited far too long with writing the book, a delay caused by circumstances beyond my control. I should like to write a second book about my own life for the benefit of my offspring. However, whether I get around to it at my age when this book is finished is a big question. It is now the year 2022, and I am 80 years old!
