Alfred Goldsteen

My father, Alfred Goldsteen, was a Jew, however, he was married to a Gentile wife so he was exempt from deportation to the East. As an ex-Dutch Army soldier he had connections and began to work for the resistance. In order to be able to travel, which was forbidden for Jews, he obtained the compulsory ID card from an Army mate and had a Jewish photographer remove this mate’s photo and put in his own photo. This worked for quite a while; however, on 15 February 1944 he was travelling on a train to Amsterdam. Two Dutch Nazis, accompanied by a German soldier, were checking the papers of all the passengers. They discovered that Alfred’s ID card was falsified. They put him under the guard of the soldier and continued checking people’s papers down the train. As my father was born and raised in Germany he spoke to the soldier and asked him to let him go. The soldier responded that if it were up to him he would let him go, however, those ‘damned traitors’ scared him. He was worried about being sent to the Russian front if they reported him. He also said that although they made use of Dutch Nazi collaborators the Germans considered them traitors to their country and despised them.

They took Alfred to police HQ in Amsterdam, where he was booked in at 14:00 (2 PM) and spent the night there. The next day two Dutch plainclothes police officers took him to The Hague to enable him to say goodbye to my mother and me and collect some clothing, because, as they said, it was quite cold in the prison in Scheveningen, i.e. the Oranje Hotel.

In late 1943 Alfred was already wanted by the Security police after his mother and sister-in-law had been arrested in our home on 11 October, but they did not know what he looked like. They never knew he was arrested.

My mother suggested that he could escape, while the Dutch police officers remained in her mother’s living room, but he had given his word of honour he would not try to escape, so he said his goodbyes and the police took him to the Oranje Hotel, without being handcuffed.

Alfred was incarcerated in the Oranje Hotel and assigned prisoner number 9163 and placed in cell corridor B, cell 352. He remained there until 1 April 1944 and was taken to the transit camp at Westerbork once they found out he was a Jew. My sister was born 4 days after he was taken to the Oranje Hotel, so he never saw her but was somehow informed by, presumably, a prison official that she was born. While in Westerbork he was able to communicate with my mother and she sent him some photos of his new daughter. My mother spent a lot of time and made many efforts to try and get him released but to no avail. On 3 September 1944 he was put on a train to Auschwitz, it was the last train to go there. He was selected for slave labour and remained in a satellite camp until the prisoners were evacuated on or about 19 January 1945. He most likely walked all the way to the camp in Austria located near the town of Mauthausen. He was put to work in a plane factory, but had developed hunger oedema. He was taken to the camp ‘hospital’ on 10 April 1945 where he was beaten to near death and later that day given an injection with air into a vein, which killed him.