Retiree once drove for Nazi officer and lived

Dabbing at tear-filled eyes, 91-year-old Fred Goldstein still wonders why he was picked to be chauffeur and mechanic for a captain in the notorious Schutzstaffel, a feared Nazi paramilitary force better known as the SS, during the Holocaust.

Goldstein realizes the selection spared him from being sent to the gas chamber at the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland where German dictator Adolf Hitler sent many of the approximately 6 million European Jews marked for extermination.

“I was summoned to appear one morning in 1944 at the SS office about 100 miles from the concentration camp I was at in Holland near the Rhine River,” Goldstein said. “I expected the worst. A man drove me to SS headquarters and said nothing. There, I met a tall man who was an SS captain. He took me into his office, looked at me and said, ‘From now on, you work for me.’ All I could do was nod my head and say, ‘Yes.’”

Goldstein, a resident of Scottsdale Shadows condominiums since his retirement in 1979, thinks the Nazis may have known of his skill with vehicles and, because he was 22 years old and strong, found him useful. He spent 7˝ years in concentration camps in Germany and Holland before and during World War II. He was first imprisoned in 1938 in Germany and, after being released and fleeing illegally to the Netherlands a year later, wound up in a concentration camp there when the war broke out in 1939. He left when the war ended in 1945, also avoiding the serial number tattoo many prisoners had.

“So many people I knew, including my parents, were sent to the gas chamber to die and I was not,” said Goldstein, the lone male in his family, whose youngest sister died at the age of 16 while two others avoided capture. “From the camp I was in alone, I saw 93 trains filled with 1,200 Jews each time leave for the death camp at Auschwitz. I always thought I should have been on one of those trains. Yet, I always knew I would be saved and thank God I was. They killed about 30,000 from my camp. Why did they save me?”

Goldstein said he was treated fairly well by the SS captain — “I didn’t have enough time to be afraid,” he said — except when he inquired about the fate of his parents, who were taken to a concentration camp in 1942, three years after he last saw them.

“He said, ‘Never ask me a question like that again,’” Goldstein said. “I knew then that my parents went to the gas chamber that same year. My best friends all died. I had guilt for a long time. It’s something that will always stay with me.”

Goldstein, who came to the United States in 1949, met his wife of 57 years, Ruth, in the Bronx in 1949 and married her one year later. She died on April 29, his 91st birthday. Goldstein credits her with helping him find a hobby, which has kept him busy and with little time to think about the past.

Scottsdale Shadows had a woodworking shop and, about 10 years ago, Ruth Goldstein told her husband he should try making portraits from wood. The results are amazing. Goldstein calls his work art in wood, an excellent description of the mostly caricature work he does by hand in a small area in the kitchen of his home.

“I hadn’t done anything like this before, but I was always very handy,” said Goldstein, who attended electronics school and became a radio and television technician before returning to the auto-repair industry. “I love it. I can spend three to four hours at a time doing it. It has become a big part of my life.”

Goldstein’s condo is filled with his handiwork. There are pieces of various sizes, all made of wood with a flet saw and Dremel carving tool. He has done pieces of Elton John, Bill Clinton playing a sax, Liza Minnelli, Laurel and Hardy and various scenes. The lone piece he has sold so far is an Elvis Presley that went for $250.

Although he has done several works with Jewish themes, none depicts the Holocaust.

“I couldn’t,” Goldstein said. “I saw too many things happen. I really do try to forget.”

Goldstein can be reached by e-mail at fastfred@hotmail.com.