Henry Golde - Oral History Interview, 1980
Henry Golde was a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust who settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after World War II.
Henry Golde was born in Plock, Poland, on May 5, 1929, the younger son of a Polish father and a Lithuanian mother. When the Germans occupied Plock in September 1939, Henry's family was ordered into a ten-block area of the city designated as the Jewish ghetto.
The ghetto was liquidated in early 1940. The Golde family was transported to the city of Chmielnik and again forced to live in a ghetto. After six months, 11-year-old Henry was selected for forced labor at the munitions factory at Skarzysko-Kamienna, Poland. His parents and brother were gassed at Treblinka.
In the fall of 1943, the Germans shipped Henry to a slave labor camp at Czestochowa, Poland. After three months, he was deported to Buchenwald. He was there for a brief period before being transferred to a munitions factory at Colditz, Germany. Shortly before the end of the war, the slave laborers at Colditz were force-marched to Theresienstadt in Czecho¬slovakia. The Russian army liberated the city on May 1, 1945.
Henry remained at Theresienstadt with 300 other children until June 1945 when the British government airlifted them to Windermere, England. With the help of Jewish organizations in Britain, the children were housed in hostels and taught technical trades. Henry became a tailor. His wife, whom he married in 1948, was also a tailor.
The Goldes immigrated to the U.S. in 1952. Henry worked as a tailor, cab driver, and salesman in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio before arriving in Milwaukee in 1954. He held a variety of jobs during the 1960s. In 1972 he bought a tavern in Merrill, Wisconsin and ran it for five years. Henry remained involved with the Merrill community, lectured on the Holocaust, and served on the boards of many local organizations. He moved to Neenah in the 1980s. As of January 2009, Henry was living in Appleton.
Henry Golde, Oral History Interview
Listen to Henry Golde tell his story to the Wisconsin Historical Society interviewer.
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Oral Histories: Wisconsin Survivors of the Holocaust
Hear the stories of 22 Holocaust Survivors and two American witnesses interviewed between 1974 and 1981.