THE 20 CHILDREN

Sara Goldfinger

For a long time, this child was called "Surcis Goldinger". The Italian researcher Alberta Bezzan from the Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (CDEC) and the author Maria Pia Bernicchia have established through their research that the correct name is in fact Sara Goldfinger.

Sara Goldfinger was born on 20 September 1933 in Ostrowiec, Poland. On 3 August 1944, she was sent from a forced labour camp in Ostrowiec to the Auschwitz concentration camp with 305 women and children. She survived the selection and was given the prisoner number A16918. Her parents Icek (Yitzhak) Goldfinger and Hudes(s)a Goldfinger, née Mincberg died in the German extermination camps, as did her sister Chava, named after her grandmother. Her grandparents Yaakov and Chava and her uncles Shmuel, Menakhem, Tzvi and Leib also did not survive the Holocaust.

Sara Goldfinger was eleven years old when she was brought to Neuengamme concentration camp on 28 November 1944. She was murdered here on Bullenhuser Damm on 20 April 1945.

The long-suspected spelling Goldinger appears in this spelling on a list of children's names published by Henry Meyer in his book "Rapport fra Neuengamme" in 1945. In 1949, Rose Grumelin-Witońska, the mother of Eleonora and Roman Witoński, asked the International Tracing Service for various children known to her, including a girl "Surcis Goldfinger". The International Tracing Service informed her that the girl may have come to the Auschwitz concentration camp on 3 August 1944 with a transport of 306 prisoners from the Ostrowiec forced labour camp.