The Goldberger brothers once played soccer in the cobbled market square of Wadowice, their laughter mingling with the morning bustle. We know this not from myth, but from memory—Karol Wojtyła, later known to the world as Pope John Paul II, recalled Poldek Goldberger as one of his childhood companions on the field.

 

Moniek, Poldek, Eduard, and Adolf—later known as Dolek, and eventually Maurice—were the sons of Maksymilian and Eleonore Goldberger. Their family home stood at Rynek 18, overlooking the square. Not far away, at Rynek 2, Karol Wojtyła and his father lived in an apartment rented from the Jewish Balamuth family. The two families likely knew each other well. After all, Max Goldberger was a dentist—just like his brother—and everyone knows their dentist.

 

In the 1930s, the Goldberger boys pursued studies in law and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków—the same halls where the young Wojtyła immersed himself in Polish literature and earned a reputation as a gifted actor.

 

Toward the end of the decade, Adolf—by then known as Maurice—married Lotta (Charlotte) Glazer, a woman from a German-Jewish family in Bielitz–Bielsko. But the shadow was already falling.

 

In September 1939, with the German army advancing fast, the Goldbergers fled eastward, seeking refuge in the uncertain safety of eastern Poland. Maurice took up a false identity as a physician in Sielec, a fragile disguise that could only hold for so long. In October 1942, they were arrested. By winter, they were prisoners in the newly established Nazi concentration camp of Majdanek.

 

They were among the first.

 

Charlotte became one of the first women incarcerated there. It was still a concentration camp, gradually converted into a death facility. By late 1942, Majdanek had become one of the six German Nazi death camps.

 

We do not know how they survived the horrors of November 3rd and 4th, 1943—the days of Operation “Harvest Festival,” when 42,000 Jews were slaughtered across the Lublin district in a single, calculated purge. We only know that they did.

 

Somehow, they endured. Perhaps it was Charlotte’s strict German upbringing that gave her the strength to hold her ground, speaking impeccable High German even in the camp. A Nazi once told her that she didn’t look or act like a Jew.

 

It is believed that they remained in Majdanek until its liberation on July 22, 1944. The next trace of their existence is a postwar registration: survivors of Lublin, living at Czwartek Street No. 4.

 

They spoke little of those years, as was the case for many who survived. But fragments remain.

One day, Maurice walked up a hill to the old Jewish community building—before the war, it had been the Perec House. Now, he ran a canteen for survivors there. As he approached, he saw a woman. He stopped her and asked, “Do you know who I am?”

She looked at him for a long moment, then said, “A ghost.”

 

In May 1945, Maurice and Charlotte left Poland behind for good, fleeing not only the ruins of war, but also the rising tide of antisemitism and Soviet oppression. They settled briefly in Tirschenreuth, Bavaria, filling out their UNRRA displaced persons cards with a stark and chilling line:

 

“Not back to Poland—for all my relatives there are dead.”

 

By the early 1950s, they had crossed the ocean. Their new address: 1702 Bathgate Avenue, Bronx, New York.

The rest, as they say, is history.

 

But like so many survivor stories, it was a history largely unspoken—for decades, shrouded in silence.