A little orphaned girl who turned away from a life she loved to return to her Jewish roots. The story of Goldine Ehrenfeld Teicher

Belgium, 1945. A seven-year-old Jewish girl paces the hall of the Jewish orphanage. She clutches her necklace — a cross. Back and forth, back and forth across the hall. Finally, she comes to a decision.

The little girl walks through the corridors until she reaches her counselor’s room. She knocks and enters. “Here, Mademoiselle Miriam,” she says, gently removing her necklace.

“This not my G-d. I don’t need this anymore.”

Taking Flight

Born in Cologne, Germany, in 1938, Goldine Ehrenfeld was only three months old when her life was overturned.

On the night of November 9th — Kristallnacht — someone pounded on the Ehrenfelds’ neighbor’s door. “Men harget Y idden, they’re killing Jews!” the person screamed. For Klara Ehrenfeld, Goldine’s mother, the moment held an extra measure of terror as her husband, Adolf Ehrenfeld, had already been deported.

Klara and her sister Betty quickly dressed the children and fled. From her temporary refuge, Klara set her sights on Belgium, where her brother Joachim Feldman lived with his family. But to take a train across the border, one needed proper documents — which Klara didn’t have. Smuggling across the border, with children, wasn’t feasible either.

With no recourse, Klara decided to split the family up. She smuggled herself and her two older children across the border, then arranged for her sister to get the younger two across. Betty accompanied Goldine and two-year-old Mordechai to the border town of Aachen, Germany. She pinned railway tickets to their clothes, gave them a soporific, and arranged for Joachim to pick them up at the first stop on the Belgian side of the border.

But Klara wasn’t the only parent using this method to get children across the border — according to Goldine’s cousin, there were 40 unaccompanied babies on the train that night — and the Belgian police had decided to put a stop to it.

Joachim and his Belgian sister-in-law, Charlotte Bauminger, were horrified when they arrived at the station in Belgium only to find Belgian border guards removing the unaccompanied children from the train, planning to send them right back to Germany. Charlotte interceded, and thanks to her Belgian papers, was able to bring the children to Antwerp, where their mother awaited them.

The Ehrenfelds’ reprieve was short. On May 10, 1940, barely a year after Goldine’s arrival, the Germans invaded Belgium. In under a month, they controlled the entire country.

But the Nazis didn’t immediately impose anti-Jewish restrictions and thus lulled Belgian Jews into a false sense of security. For the Ehrenfelds, this was particularly tragic.

In June 1941, Klara realized her years-long quest to emigrate across the Atlantic would not come to fruition. She wrote to Betty, by then in the United States: “We must, I think, have patience until the war is over.” Due to the Nazis’ subversive tactics, Klara believed she and her family could just wait the war out.

The deportations began one year later, in the summer of 1942. But even then, the Nazis managed to deceive Goldine’s family — and many others — about the true nature of these “transports.” As part of the deception, they promised that children would be sent to school. This part of the deception was a godsend for Goldine, since it convinced her mother to leave her behind. She was only four, too small for school.

What can we do with her? Klara wondered.