MAY 2 • 2024 | 39
J
N

I 

met Dieter Sander in early September 
2022, when two stolpersteine for Frieda 
Goldstein and her son Samuel were 
installed in Berlin. Small brass markers, 
or “stumbling stones,
” are 
embedded in sidewalks at 
the addresses where Nazi 
victims had last lived. These 
two at Fehrbellinerstrae 19 
help to swell the numbers of 
a crowd-sourced memorial 
project, now counting over 
80,000 individual markers 
spreading over 24 countries. 

My ties to the Goldsteins, whose stones I 
had sponsored, began by chance. During a 
2012 trip with students to study Holocaust 
memorials in Germany, our response to 
stumbling upon brass markers all over the 
city prompted a desire to retrieve from dark 
forgetfulness one or two Jewish victims, 
preferably who had last lived near our 
Rosenthaler Platz hostel. We chose Frieda 
Goldstein’s name from a 1938 address book. 
Ten years later, I was in Berlin for the 
installation and to continue tracing the 
stories of Frieda and her son Samuel in 
archives and across the landscapes of 
Germany, Poland and England. Here are 
the inscriptions on the stolpersteine: 

Hier Wohnte [Here Lived]
Frieda Goldstein
Jg. 1871 [Born]
Deportiert 24.10.1941 [Deported]
Lodz
Ermordet 15.5.1942 [Murdered]
Kulmhof [Chelmno]

Hier Wohnte [Here Lived] 
Samuel Goldstein
Geb 1902 [Born]
Flucht [Escape] 1939
England

This bare summary tells us nothing of 
their lives after birth, except the resolutions 
of their Holocaust experiences. Both were 
born in the town of Oświęcim, its Polish 
name now overshadowed by the German 
renaming as Auschwitz. I learned that the 
entire Goldstein family, parents and five 
children, had moved to Berlin in 1920, 
where Samuel became a dentist. By the 
summer of 1939, after his other siblings 

had fled Germany, he and Frieda shared 
an apartment on Fehrbellinerstrae. Then 
the fates of this Jewish mother and son 
diverged. 
Samuel escaped to England just seven 
weeks before the war began and found 
refuge in Kitchener Camp on the Kentish 
coast where some 4,000 young Jewish men 
from Germany and Austria were sheltered. 
Frieda remained in Berlin until October 
1941, when she was deported back to 
Poland and confined in the Łodz ghetto. 
Seven months later, she was murdered in 
the gas vans at Chelmno.

Our a short ceremony in 2022 at 

Fehrbellinerstrae was rather austere. None 
of the five surviving Goldstein siblings 
had descendants, and there were only six 
non-relatives in attendance. I could tell that 
Dieter was disappointed in the rushed time 
schedule and the spareness of the event. So, 
he took my wife and me under his wing for 
the day, showing us stolpersteine that he 
had supervised in the area. Then at a café 
on Shoenhauser Alle, already crowded with 
young people beginning their late-summer 
weekend, he invited us to attend another 
stolpersteine event outside the Helene-
Haeusler-Schule on Mendelssohnstrae, so 
we could “see how it should be done.
” There 

would be music, he said, including a song 
made famous by Marlene Dietrich, “Sag 
mir, wo die Blumen sind.” 
Basking in the intense late-summer sun 
and sipping an excellent weiss kristall beer, 
I wondered about the appropriateness of 
using a Dietrich song at such a moment. 
But the pleasures of the afternoon, the sun 
and the effervescent kristall distracted me. 
I did not later research the school where 
the ceremony would be held. Dieter had 
emphasized the participation of students, 
but I assumed it would be the typical kind 
of community project so common in public 
schools today.

A SPECIAL CEREMONY 
AT A SPECIAL SCHOOL
On the day of the ceremony, I arrived just 
in time at Mendelssohnstrae 10. It was no 
small feat to dash by S-Bahn and tram from 
the Landesarchiv on the city’s far northwest-
ern edge to its center in under 40 minutes. 
After negotiating the chaotic Mollstrae, 
a busy four-lane road with bright yellow 
trams speeding down its center, I made my 
way to what seemed an unlikely location for 
a school. A ten-story apartment building 
dominated its street. Apartments looming 
over me, I rushed up Mendelssohnstrae to 

continued on page 40

Robert 
Franciosi
Special to the 
 
Jewish News 

YOM HASHOAH

Shining 
 Stones, 
Fading 
 Hopes 

Dieter Sander and members of the Horowicz family. Rachel of Kibutz Kfar Aza is in the center.

PHOTOS BY ROBERT FRANCIOSI

