by Jill Huber
NJJN Bureau Chief/Monmouth

November 4, 2008

On Jan. 16, 1945, Vera Herman Goodkin and her parents were liberated from Nazi terror by the Russian occupation of Budapest. The legendary Raoul Wallenberg played a crucial role in their journey to safety — along with a number of seeming miracles.

Goodkin, an associate of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, told her story to an audience on Oct. 6 at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft. The event was sponsored by the college’s Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Center.

“A series of miracles played a part in our survival,” Goodkin told NJ Jewish News. “Wallenberg and his 500 Jewish volunteers were among the miracles.”

Goodwin was born in Czechoslovakia. For two years before the Nazi occupation in 1939, Jews escaping from Germany would pass through the family’s home.

“I was five years old when I overheard a conversation between my mother and grandmother,” Goodkin said. “My grandmother said the handwriting was on the wall and that my family should leave. My mother said Nazi atrocities would never happen here. It’s a decision she regretted the rest of her life.”

In March 1939, the Germans paraded into the town square and imposed the Nuremberg laws.

“One day, there was a knock on our door, and people who were Nazi sympathizers said they were occupying our house,” Goodkin said. “The house and everything in it became theirs. In an instant, we were homeless, and we realized that the next thing we would lose would be our lives.”

Goodkin’s father, a doctor, was forced to work in a quarry where, she said, he suffered humiliation and abuse. When the family lost their home, they hid in attics and cottages of those willing to shelter them.

By 1943, the family had migrated to Slovakia. They were hiding in an attic when two men from the Nazi SS and the local secret police paid a “visit,” along with a man who Goodkin thinks is the collaborator who had betrayed the family.

“This unholy trio warned us that we’d be on the next transport to Auschwitz,” she said. Her mother had heard about local farmers who belonged to the underground. “She literally went from door to door to find a contact, and she succeeded.”

In November 1943, when Goodkin was 12, the contact told the family to remove the yellow stars from their coats and walk to the railroad station; from there they followed a young man to a nearby farm, where they hid in his rat-infested attic.

A day later, the family was led through a forest in the pouring rain. Their guide suddenly panicked and began to run away. Goodkin’s mother “called out to him and asked him how he could do this; he was a man with children of his own,” Goodkin said. “He stopped running, turned around, and took us back to the attic.

“It was a miracle that he came back for us.”

Ultimately, the family arrived in Budapest, where they went into hiding for two months before being discovered and sent to a holding prison. The morning after their arrival, 2,000 Jews were transported to Auschwitz; Goodkin and her parents were not among them.

“That was another miracle,” she said. “But when we were taken to a second holding prison closer to the Austrian border, we were suffering from malnutrition and other diseases. Then came another miracle — I met my rescuer.”

The mothers and children in the prison were told to go to the courtyard, where there were three men from the Swedish Red Cross. They said if the mothers agreed, children from age five to 14 could be released to their custody. Many mothers were suspicious and kept their children, but Goodkin’s mother edged her daughter toward the men.

“She had a sixth sense — another miracle — and knew I would be safe,” she said. “As we left, the three men told us they were not from the Red Cross. They worked for a diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg.”

The children were taken to a home run by the Swedish Red Cross. Goodkin contracted scarlet fever and was hospitalized. While she was there, German soldiers came to the home and killed all the children. Goodkin was sent to a Swedish Red Cross orphanage when she recovered.

Meanwhile, her parents managed to reunite and walk for three weeks before reaching a besieged Budapest. They made their way to the Swedish embassy and met Wallenberg. When he noticed their last name, another miracle took place, Goodkin said.

“He said, ‘We have your little girl here,’” she said. “We were reunited and spent the last 10 weeks of the siege in a cellar. In January 1945, the Russians occupied the city. The war was over for us.”

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‘Always hope’

ALTHOUGH RAOUL Wallenberg helped Vera Herman Goodkin and her parents survive the Holocaust, the war didn’t end for the man who is credited with saving more than 100,000 Jews. A day after the Herman family was liberated in January 1945 in Budapest, Wallenberg met with a Russian general and disappeared. It is believed that he was taken to a Russian gulag and was never seen again, Goodkin said.

In 1989, Goodkin met Wallenberg’s sister, who came to the United States as a guest of the Raoul Wallenberg Committee of New Jersey.

When the two women met, Wallenberg’s sister asked if she could touch Goodkin.

“She said that when she touched any of the people he saved, she could feel his presence,” Goodkin said.

Goodkin’s family came to the United States in 1947. She attended New York University and taught English and French literature at Mercer County Community College, where she is now professor emeritus. She and her husband, Jerry, live in Lawrenceville; they have two daughters.

Goodkin told her story in a 2006 memoir, In Sunshine and in Shadow, and has shared her history with students and community and religious groups throughout the country.

“My mission is to show that hatred can take us to terrible depths,” she said. “The Holocaust is not just history — ethnic cleansing is still taking place in Darfur, Bosnia, and other places. Perhaps what I say will influence young people to try and make this a better world. There is always hope.”

— JILL HUBER

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