René Goldman

René Goldman was born to a Jewish family in Luxembourg, the son of Mira and Wolf Goldman. In 1940, at the start of World War II, his family fled to Brussels, Belgium, where he attended a Flemish school for two years. He later wrote in his memoir about the introduction of the yellow star for Jews to wear in 1942, when he was eight years old, and seeing signs in front of cinemas and parks saying Jews and dogs were not allowed. As the Nazis advanced into the Benelux countries, the Goldmans planned to take ship to South America via France's so-called free zone in the south. While waiting to sail, they were interned with other migrants in the town of Lons-Le-Saunier. After two weeks, 13,000 Jews were rounded up in one night for deportation, René and his mother among them. His father escaped and joined the French Resistance. Somehow René's aunt Fella, a French citizen, managed to arrive at the railway station and pull him away from the crowd. He only learned years later after much research that his mother was sent to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau; and his father was captured, also sent to Auschwitz, and died on a death march in 1945. René was hidden in a variety of locations, including a rural Catholic school for boys and a farm family. At the end of the war, he was placed in group homes run by the left-leaning Commission Centrale de l'Enfance (CCE), and joined Communist youth organizations. Unaware of the fate of his parents, he stayed in France hoping to be reunited with them instead of emigrating. At age 16, he went to study in Poland. In 1953, he accepted an opportunity to go to Beijing, China for five years, and studied Chinese language, literature, and history. He then received a scholarship to Columbia University and arrived in New York City in 1960. After graduating, he joined the faculty of the University of British Columbia, Canada, where he taught courses in Chinese history. René Goldman's memoir, A Childhood on the Move: Memoirs of a Child-Survivor of the Holocaust was published in 2014 and reprinted in 2017 as A Childhood Adrift by the Azrieli Foundation.