Manfred Goldberg: Holocaust survivor who said he was 'heartbroken' by Gaza dies aged 95

Manfred Goldberg, a prominent Holocaust survivor who last year told Middle East Eye he had been left "heartbroken" by Israel's war on Gaza, has died at the age of 95.

Goldberg, who was born in Germany in 1930 and arrived in the UK in 1946 after the Second World War as a teenage survivor of Nazi concentration camps, was presented earlier this year with the Member of the British Empire (MBE) medal by King Charles for his services to Holocaust education.

Goldberg told MEE he had only begun to talk publicly about his own Holocaust experiences when he was in his 70s.

But in subsequent years he became a well-known Jewish community figure. Working closely with the Holocaust Educational Trust, he regularly spoke in schools and was frequently interviewed and profiled by the media.

In recent years, he took part in Testimony 360, an immersive Holocaust educational tool using virtual reality and artificial intelligence technology to preserve survivors' stories for future generations.

He also regularly attended Holocaust memorial events where he was feted by and photographed alongside members of the royal family and prime ministers.

In January 2024, Goldberg spoke to MEE about his friendship with another Holocaust survivor, Zigi Shipper, after a British man fighting for the Israeli army had filmed himself wearing a Jewish prayer shawl that had belonged to Shipper in an abandoned home in Gaza.

In the footage, which was posted on social media, the soldier appeared to link Israel's war to the memory of the Holocaust.

He suggested he was there "to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again", before graffitiing a Star of David and writing the Hebrew phrase "Am Yisrael Chai" ("The People of Israel live") on the wall.

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Goldberg told MEE that Shipper, who had died aged 93 in 2023, would have been "astounded and upset" by the episode, and by the scale of death and destruction inflicted on the Palestinian territory.

"He would have been as heartbroken as I am because neither of us imagined anything like that would be witnessed by us," he said.

Commenting on Goldberg's death, Agnes Kory, a Holocaust survivor born in Hungary in 1944, who is among survivors and their descendants who have regularly protested against the Gaza war, told MEE: "Like many people in Jewish communities and outside, I am saddened by the passing of Manfred Goldberg MBE.

"As a fellow Jewish Holocaust survivor, I am painfully aware that with the passing of each and any survivor, the task of maintaining the real horror of the Holocaust becomes harder and harder.

"I am deeply concerned about the use of the Holocaust to justify what is done to the Palestinians, so I was gratified to learn that Manfred Goldberg was mindful of such approaches and disapproved."

Goldberg was born in Kassel, central Germany, in 1930. In 1941, aged 11, he was transported to the Riga ghetto in Nazi-occupied Latvia.

From 1943 he was sent to a number of concentration camps, including Stutthof in modern-day Poland.

He met Shipper in 1944 at Stolp, a subcamp of Stutthof, where both boys, who were then 14, were put to work as slave labourers repairing railway lines damaged by bombing raids.

"We were the youngest people in the group so we drifted towards each other," Goldberg recalled.

"Initially we had difficulty because Zigi's native language was Polish and I spoke German. Very soon we found my father had spoken Yiddish to me and Zigi's grandfather spoke Yiddish to him, so that was our common language."

In April 1945, as the end of the war loomed and Soviet forces closed in, Goldberg and Shipper found themselves thrown together again, along with Goldberg's mother who was also imprisoned at Stutthof, among prisoners sent west on a "death march" accompanied by SS guards.

By then many of the prisoners were weak from starvation and typhus.

"Zigi was in a very bad state but we stuck together," Goldberg recalled.

"If anyone was weak and began trailing behind they were shot immediately. Many people were shot that morning. I put my arm around him and began dragging him along."

After reaching the Baltic coast, the prisoners were forced onto barges and set adrift on the sea. Eventually, after six days, the barges drifted ashore, at which point the guards returned and shot dead anyone too weak to clamber out of the boats.

Those that were left were rounded up and made to march once again. Dawn was breaking when suddenly a column of British tanks loomed into view on the road ahead and the guards fled.

"That was our moment of liberation. There was such pandemonium," said Goldberg.

In the chaos, he and Shipper lost each other, only to meet again weeks later at a convalescence home in Germany after both had been hospitalised with typhus.

Goldberg and his mother moved to London in 1946, joining his father who had escaped to the UK before the war. He built his life in the UK, marrying his wife in 1961. The couple had four children.

Shipper also ended up in London after the war, and the men remained close friends throughout their lives.

Goldberg credited Shipper with encouraging him to speak about his experiences later in his life. By then Shipper was also actively involved in Holocaust education work, and Goldberg said he was well known for conveying a simple message: "Do not hate."

"That became his trademark," he said. "He became really worked up. He told people, 'whatever happens don't hate. Hate is indefensible'."

Asked whether Shipper would have been concerned by the conduct of Israeli forces in Gaza, Goldberg told MEE: "How can you ask such a question? Who is not upset? Zigi was a very outspoken person. He made a lot more noise than I did. He would have been beside himself."