Holocaust survivor to share his terrifying odyssey

By Steve Zalusky Daily Herald Staff Writer

Thursday, January 13, 2005

Posted 1/12/2005

www.dailyherald.com/search/main_story.asp?intid=3836466

The month was January, the year 1943.

[…]

On the run from the Germans, Morris Goldner and his father, Leap, had found their way to the home of a supposed friend.

The man turned out to be an informant who tied them up and had them taken to the train station to be shot by a German officer. Before he did his duty, the officer told the informant, “… these two may be Jews, but what I see in front of me are two human beings. And you make me come here to kill two innocent people?”

Trailing both his and his father’s blood into a nearby clump of bushes, Goldner encountered another man who would change his life.

[…]

In the forest, Goldner runs into a notorious Polish outlaw, recently escaped from Auschwitz, who teaches him how to use firearms and ultimately presses him into service with the Polish resistance.

In one chapter, Goldner, pretending to be wandering aimlessly, throws a grenade in the path of a transport carrying about a dozen German soldiers. In another chapter, the diminutive teenager squeezes into a coffin-like compartment beneath a train carrying Jews to Auschwitz, his purpose to take pictures for the resistance.

“It read like a fictional adventure novel,” said Maxine Sukenik, who directs the temple’s adult education program. She said the temple is excited to get the increasingly rare opportunity to hear the stories of a survivor.

[…]

© 2005 Daily Herald, Paddock Publications, Inc.