Henry Golde (1929–2019)

Henry Golde was born to a Jewish family in Plock, Poland. He was a child when Nazi Germany occupied the town in 1939 at the start of World War II. His family and the other Jews of Plock were forced into a ghetto. The ghetto was liquidated in early 1940, and the Golde family was then deported to the Chmielnik ghetto. After six months, 11-year-old Henry was separated from his family and selected for forced labor at the munitions factory at Skarzysko-Kamienna, Poland. His parents and 16-year old brother were murdered in the gas chamber at Treblinka. In the fall of 1943, the Germans shipped Henry to a slave labor camp at Czestochowa, Poland and then to the concentration campa at Buchenwald. He was there for a brief period before being transferred to work at munitions factory at Colditz, Germany. As the Allies advanced near the end of the war, those still alive were sent on a two-week death march to Terezín (Theresienstadt) in Czechoslovakia. Henry survived to be liberated by the Red Army in May 1945. He remained at Terezín with 300 other children for another month, when the British government airlifted them to Windermere, England. With the help of Jewish organizations in the UK, the children were housed in hostels and taught technical trades. Henry spent seven years in England, including two years in the Royal Navy. He became a tailor and married a woman who was also a tailor. The couple immigrated to the USA in 1952. He worked as a tailor, cab driver, and salesman in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio before moving to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1954. There he held a variety of jobs during the 1960s. In 1972, he bought a tavern in Merrill, Wisconsin and ran it for five years. He lectured widely at schools on his experiences, and served on the boards of many local organizations. His memoir Ragdolls was published in 2002.