Helen Lebowitz Goldkind

Helen Goldkind was born Helena Lebowitz on July 9, 1928, in Vološanka, Czechoslovakia (today Volosyanka, Ukraine). This small town, nestled in the Carpathian Mountains, had a thriving Jewish community. One of seven children in a close-knit, observant Jewish family, Helen grew up surrounded by her large extended family. Her father, Martin, owned a shoe store, and her mother, Rose (née Moskowitz), took care of the home and children. In spring 1939, when Helen was 10 years old, Hungary annexed Subcarpathian Rus, the region of Czechoslovakia where her family lived. Now under Hungarian rule, the Lebowitz family was subjected to the Hungarian government’s antisemitic laws. These laws restricted Jewish economic life and defined Jews racially, similar to Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Race Laws. 

Helen attended public school, where she experienced discrimination from the teachers. After school, she continued her education in Hebrew with a private Jewish  tutor, who eventually also taught other Jewish students in the community. Eventually her father was forced to give up his business, and the family had to rely on the few livestock her grandparents still owned for food.

In March 1944, Nazi Germany occupied Hungary. A new series of antisemitic measures drastically restricted Jewish life in Hungary. Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David badge on their clothing. Many able-bodied Jewish men, including Helen’s father and two older brothers, were sent to perform forced labor. In mid-April, Helen and the rest of her family were ordered to pack a single suitcase and gather in the town square.

Helen’s grandfather packed a Torah scroll he had taken for safekeeping from their synagogue, and the family put on multiple layers of clothing, so that they could fit other items in their suitcases. They were sent to a transit ghetto in Ungvár (today Uzhhorod, Ukraine), which was little more than an old brick factory with a roof and no walls, surrounded by a lumber yard. There were no sanitary facilities, and the brickyard quickly became overcrowded. The Lebowitz family was among about 18,000 Jews forced into these appalling conditions. The Hungarian gendarmes in charge of the ghetto were cruel and publicly humiliated Helen’s grandfather by beating him and cutting off his beard. In the last two weeks of May, Jews from the Ungvár transit ghetto–including Helen’s family–were deported to Auschwitz.

When Helen and her family arrived at Auschwitz, they experienced shocking violence. An SS man beat Helen’s grandfather to death for refusing to desecrate his Torah scroll. His terrified family watched helplessly as his body was thrown into the back of a truck. 

At Auschwitz, the family was separated as their transport underwent selection, in which an SS officer chose which prisoners would be killed in the gas chambers and which would be selected for forced labor. Helen’s grandmother, Helen’s sister Sura, and Helen’s younger brother Efraim were sent in one direction. Helen, her sister Sylvia, and their mother Rose were sent in the other direction. But, Rose would not be separated from Efraim. Helen and Sylvia watched as the guards beat their mother as she ran after her young son, pleading with them to let her go with him. The girls never saw their family members again.

Helen and her sister remained in Auschwitz for about five weeks before they were sent to a camp in Germany to work at a munitions factory with other women and girls. There they loaded empty shells with gunpowder, but the ventilation was poor and the gunpowder was poisonous. It burned the girls’ skin and eyes, turning them yellow; many died under such conditions.

Although very weak, Helen survived with the help of her sister. In spring 1945, they were loaded onto trucks and sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where soldiers of the British 11th Armored Division liberated them on April 15, 1945. Helen and Sylvia both fell ill in the camp and, after a brief separation, were together sent to Sweden to recuperate. Later, they found out that one of their brothers had survived the Hungarian forced labor service. 

In 1946 Helen and Sylvia immigrated to the United States to live in Brooklyn with their older sister, Frances, who had immigrated to the US before the war. Helen married Abe Goldkind in 1947 and they had three children. A longtime volunteer at the Museum, Helen shared her Holocaust history with countless visitors.