Helma Goldmark, Holocaust refugee who joined the resistance, dies at 98
Helma Goldmark, an Austrian-born Jew, turned 12 in 1938, the year it became evident that she was no longer safe in her homeland.
In March, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in an event known as the Anschluss. In November, during the antisemitic rampaging of Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, SS officers abducted her father from his bed at their home in Graz. They took him to the local Jewish cemetery and beat him, knocking all the teeth from his mouth, breaking both his legs and leaving him facedown in a creek, the imprint of their boots still visible on his body. He lay there in agony until a passing milkman carried him home on a horse-drawn cart.
Mrs. Goldmark had lost her mother to cancer before the Anschluss, and her only sibling, a sister 19 years her senior, lived in Italy. With her father — and then alone, after he was taken to a concentration camp and murdered — she set out on a perilous journey that took her to fascist Croatia and Nazi-occupied Rome. As a teenager on her own in the Italian capital, she joined a resistance cell that aided Jews by furnishing them with false documents and ration cards.
Mrs. Goldmark, who moved after World War II to the United States, where she used her prodigious language skills to assist fellow immigrants as a paralegal, died March 15 at an assisted-living center in Bethesda, Md. She was 98. The cause was cerebrovascular disease, said her daughter, Susan Goldmark.
Mrs. Goldmark’s Holocaust survival story was documented in the 2010 book “Crossing Mandelbaum Gate,” a memoir by her son-in-law, Kai Bird, who is also the co-author of “American Prometheus” (2005), the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
She was born Helma Blühweis in Graz, the second-largest city in Austria, on Feb. 8, 1926. Her father, Alois, who was Jewish, ran a tannery, leather factory and leather store. Her mother, the former Hermine Jassniger, a Catholic who converted to Judaism, was an accomplished pianist.
Helma and her parents lived in an elegant apartment above her father’s store and enjoyed the services of a cook, a housekeeper, a nanny and a chauffeur. They attended religious services only on the High Holy Days and felt entirely integrated into Austrian society, Mrs. Goldmark recalled.
After the Anschluss, a member of the Nazi Party claimed ownership of her father’s business, as well as the family home, but permitted Helma and her father to sleep in the kitchen pantry.
Her father resolved to leave Austria but, having been stripped of his livelihood, lacked the funds to cover the exit fee charged by the Nazi regime. He went to the man who had confiscated his home and business and, at gunpoint, signed away all his property in exchange for enough money to cover the cost of leaving, Bird wrote.
In January 1939, Helma and her father left Austria for Yugoslavia, where his brother was publisher of a newspaper in the Croatian city of Zagreb. They enjoyed relative safety until April 1941, when the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia and a Nazi puppet government was established in Croatia under Ante Pavelic, leader of the fascist Ustasha regime.
As conditions deteriorated for Jews, Mrs. Goldmark’s father began making plans to flee to Italy and then send for his daughter.
To celebrate her 16th birthday, he delayed his departure until the following morning. Two hours before the train left, Bird wrote, the Ustasha arrested him. He was taken to the Jasenovac concentration camp south of Zagreb, where, a survivor later told Mrs. Goldmark, he was bludgeoned to death by Ustasha guards.
Mrs. Goldmark soon left for Italy, where she lived for a period in Bressanone, a town in the German-speaking north, with her sister and brotherin-law, an Italian agricultural inspector who belonged to the fascist party.
Made to feel that her “presence was a burden,” Bird wrote, and warned by her sister that she was in danger of deportation, she left in August 1943. She began traveling south, at times walking alone through the Italian countryside, and arrived in Rome days before the Germans occupied the city that September.
Finding shelter in Catholic convents and with fellow Jewish refugees, she managed to avoid arrest, even amid the infamous roundup of Roman Jews that took place Oct. 16, 1943.
In early 1944, she met a Jewish man who introduced himself as Giuseppe Levi. Noting her blond hair and blue eyes — features that might allow her to “pass” as an Aryan — he recruited her to a resistance operation led by Pierre-Marie Benoit, a French priest who had overseen the printing of thousands of false papers for Jews in France before undertaking similar work in Rome.
“I was stupid enough to say yes,” Mrs. Goldmark told Bird. “I just thought it was an adventure.”
As the Allies advanced from Southern Italy, she feigned a broken leg to avoid moving north with her Luftwaffe office and remained in Rome until the city was liberated in June 1944.
“We couldn’t believe that this was the end,” Bird quoted her as saying. “That evening was the first and last time that I got drunk. We feasted on a bottle of wine.”
In 1966, Benoit was recognized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor bestowed on Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis.
Mrs. Goldmark lived for decades in New York before moving in 1991 to the Washington area. Until late in her life, she worked in legal offices translating documents from German, Serbo-Croatian, Italian, French and Spanish.
Long after she came to the United States, she kept in her closet a suitcase — whether packed or simply ready to be packed — in the event that she would need to flee. It was, her son-in-law observed, a “symbol of her trauma.”