Yom HaShoah / Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025
My mother, Hilde Jacobsthal Goldberg, grew up mostly in Amsterdam when her family moved there from Berlin in 1929. She was just four.
The Jacobsthals and the Franks got to know each other in Amsterdam after the Frank family arrived in 1933. Hilde knew both Anne and Margot. Margot was the same age as Hilde, and they became close. After the war Otto Frank became a father figure to Hilde and eventually my godfather. My sisters and I saw a lot of him and his second wife, Fritzi, until his death in 1980.
Motherland: Growing Up with the Holocaust, chronicles my mother’s life through World War II and briefly post-war. Hers is an extraordinary story of resistance, heroism and tragedy. It even has romantic and comic elements, as lives do even in the darkest of times. She and her older brother Jo were resisters from the beginning. My mother saved small children as a teenager when she was in training at a nursery, or crèche; my uncle became part of the Dutch-Paris resistance network in Belgium, where Hilde joined him after a dangerous escape from the Netherlands in 1943. She and Jo survived in hiding and in the Resistance, but they learned after the war that their parents had been murdered at Auschwitz.
I’m the oldest of three sisters, and our family history haunted me (and us) from birth, it seemed. Motherland is an attempt to come to terms with the Holocaust for those of us now called G2, second-generation children of survivors. The Holocaust is my family’s story, my mother’s story, and now mine, which is the dilemma of my generation.
This year we’re at the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. That’s just one average human lifetime, but people are beginning to forget.
In the time since this book was published, I’ve spoken about it in schools, universities, on radio broadcasts, and in other venues and have discovered that it’s always relevant to our times, perhaps now more than ever. We’re all part of a human world that changes under our feet, and I hope that this book will help to keep readers vigilant and aware, as my mother, uncle, and father were—people who engaged with the horrors of their time and never lost hope, love of life, or compassion. The resisters in Belgium signed themselves “Courage!,” and that’s what I hope readers will take away from Motherland.
