Recently yet another ‘Holocaust Survivor’ has kicked the bucket and predictably we’ve been treated once again to their claimed ‘life story’.
Daniel Ben-David writes how this ‘Holocaust Survivor’ named Yocheved Gold’s principal claim to fame is that she was ‘mistaken for an Aryan by the Nazis’ at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin and because – in effect – ‘she was such a pretty little Aryan-looking girl’ she was ‘selected to present flowers to Hitler’ ‘but she bravely refused because of Hitler’s anti-Semitism’.
Daniel Ben-David writes in the ‘Jewish Chronicle’ that:
‘Yocheved Gold managed to slip into Berlin’s Olympic Stadium in August of 1936 to watch the opening ceremony of the games.
Then aged 13, with blue eyes and dark blonde hair, she was asked to join the procession of children presenting flowers to Hitler, who had been elected Chancellor of Germany three years earlier.
“I saw him face to face and was a little afraid,” she recalled in later life, “That I, a Jew, would give Hitler flowers? I refused.”’ (1)
Yvette Alt Miller writing for ‘Aish’ gives us a bit more detail as regards the story that Gold told:
‘And yet, the world looked away. The International Olympic Committee saw no problem hosting the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Jews were excluded from participating but 13-year-old Yocheved was determined to witness the opening ceremony. With her light hair and blue eyes, she could pass as Aryan. She slipped into the Olympic Stadium unnoticed.
Almost immediately, she was swept into a group of children selected to greet Hitler.
The children were handed flowers and instructed to line up. One by one, they would step forward, salute the Führer, and place the flowers in his hands. When Yocheved’s turn came, she froze.
“I saw him face to face,” she later recalled, “and I was a little afraid.” But fear gave way to resolve. “That I, as a Jew, would give Hitler flowers? I refused.”
She did not step forward to offer the flowers.
Somehow, her defiance went unnoticed. Her disguise held. Kater that day, the Jewish girl who had silently snubbed the most powerful man in Germany walked back home to her family, carrying with her a quiet act of resistance that would foreshadow a lifetime of courage.’ (2)
The problem here is fairly obvious: Gold’s story is entirely anecdotal and told long after the fact – she appears to have begun retailing this particular story in the 1980s/1990s decades after the events she describes suggesting that they are not actual history but fantasy (as why wouldn’t she mention them before this?) – and we actually have photographic stills of Hitler being given flowers by little girls at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (3) but none look like or can be readily identified as Gold.
Gold’s story is simply improbable and a fantasy especially as despite the fact that many jewish publications and media sites want to make out otherwise Gold wasn’t cute nor ‘Aryan-looking’ as this is Gold around the time she allegedly ‘didn’t give Hitler flowers’ in at the Berlin Olympics in 1936: (4)
Simply put we have no evidence other than Gold’s unsupported anecdotal claims decades afterwards that she was ever selected ‘to give flowers to Hitler’ at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Thus, we have to discard it for what it likely is: a post-war fantasy.
Further Gold gives us other bizarre stories in regard to what happened to her family since we are told that:
‘Gold was born in the town of Halberstadt in central Germany in 1923. Her father, Dr Aharon Neuwirth, was a rabbi, while her mother, Sara (neé Bamberger), was a descendant of a line of prominent 19th-century German rabbis.
In 1938, when Gold was around the age of 15, she witnessed the destruction of synagogues during Kristallnacht. At 16, she fled to Haifa in British-controlled Mandatory Palestine, with her parents remaining in Europe.
She managed to maintain correspondence with her parents until the final year of the war, when their letters abruptly stopped. “I was sure they had been killed,” she reflected years later. But, remarkably, her parents survived the war and the Shoah.’ (5)
Alt Miller is more specific in her account of this when she writes how Gold allegedly:
‘The following year, Yocheved managed to buy a ticket on the ship Galileo, sailing to Haifa, then in Mandatory Palestine, governed by Britain. She left behind her entire family and moved to the Land of Israel utterly alone. On board, even though she was a child herself, she nursed fellow passengers who were sick.’ (6)
So, we are told here that Gold aged sixteen somehow had the money to purchase a ticket from Germany to Haifa in Mandatory Palestine in 1939 – that this is likely porkies is shown by the fact that Gold seems to manifestly unaware of the severe immigration restrictions of the time that were based on her having a significant amount of financial capital to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine (north of £500; $39,000 in today’s money) put in place by the British authorities which she would have in no way been able to meet unless there is additional information Gold isn’t including in her story for unknown reasons – and lived there from then on.
Now as I’ve already noted Gold’s story here is impossible unless she illegally immigrated to Palestine somehow in 1939 (or had some kind of sugar daddy) but given that she also purchased a ticket from Germany to Haifa at sixteen apparently with no job as well it just seems like an invented yarn meant to cover something else up.
We are also treated to an absurd story around rat poison in regard to her father Aharon Neuwirth from Gold where-in she claims that:
‘According to Gold’s own accounts shared in interviews and the book Shemirat Shabbat Kehilchata, written by her brother, Rabbi Yehoshua Neuwirth, her parents escaped death through a succession of extraordinary events.
One such reprieve occurred when her father went to a pharmacy for treatment but, because it happened to be Shabbat, refrained from taking his medication that night. According to the book, the substance later proved to be rat poison.’ (7)
Alt Miller once again gives us a fuller account of Gold’s story:
‘Yocheved’s brother Rabbi Yehoshua Neuwirth later documented his and his family’s near misses. They were deported to a concentration camp and then freed thanks to the intervention of a Hungarian consul. One of Yocheved’s sisters managed to get a job in a village in the countryside. Their father asked her to come home one day, and that night the entire village she’d been living in was flattened in a bombing raid. Yocheved’s father was sick and bought medicine at a pharmacy. He didn’t want to go through the process of mixing it that night, which was Shabbat, and later found out that the pharmacist had in fact given him rat poison, hoping to kill him.’ (8)
Right so Gold’s father Aharon Neuwirth allegedly went to a pharmacy – note the lack of any detail as to where this pharmacy was or when this occurred (Gold’s stated timeline also looks improbable/mismatched but I won’t comment too much on that) – sometime during the Second World War and the pharmacist for some unknown reason gave him ‘rat poison’ that Neuwirth somehow didn’t recognize was ‘rat poison’ until after Shabbos and the reason why he didn’t take it was because he was ‘good jew observing Shabbos’.
So, one wonders whether the appearance/smell of the medicine/‘rat poison’ changed before, during and after Shabbos because Gold’s story – while focusing on her father’s halakhically correct conduct in the story – (9) centres on the idea that her father didn’t recognize it was ‘rat poison’, ‘didn’t take it because it was Shabbos’ and ‘recognized it after Shabbos’ as if that were a ‘Holocaust miracle’ with the necessary unstated sub-text that ‘the goyim are evil’.
The point is that the story doesn’t make a great deal of sense and shows – like Gold’s claim to have been selected as a ‘flower girl’ for the 1936 Berlin Olympics – all the hallmarks of being a later fantasy given that it has little actual detail, focuses on making a religious point not recounting the details of what allegedly happened and doesn’t make a great deal of sense as anything other than an apocryphal morality tale.
If we add to that the fact that Gold’s story of her emigration to Mandatory Palestine from Germany in 1939 also doesn’t make a great deal of sense and Gold seems completely unaware of the obvious lacunae in her story, then it goes to suggest that Gold is doing a lot of lying.
The question really is: is Yocheved Gold really Yocheved Gold and what really happened in her life?
Because it is certainly not what she claims happened.
References
(1) https://www.thejc.com/news/world/jewish-woman-adolf-hitler-flowers-berlin-olympics-yocheved-gold-dies-vj7nilrk
(2) https://aish.com/the-woman-who-refused-to-give-flowers-to-hitler/
(3) For example, see: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/little-girl-gives-a-bouquet-of-flowers-to-fascist-dictator-news-photo/3424348?adppopup=true
(4) https://aish.com/the-woman-who-refused-to-give-flowers-to-hitler/
(5) https://www.thejc.com/news/world/jewish-woman-adolf-hitler-flowers-berlin-olympics-yocheved-gold-dies-vj7nilrk
(6) https://aish.com/the-woman-who-refused-to-give-flowers-to-hitler/
(7) https://www.thejc.com/news/world/jewish-woman-adolf-hitler-flowers-berlin-olympics-yocheved-gold-dies-vj7nilrk
(8) https://aish.com/the-woman-who-refused-to-give-flowers-to-hitler/
(9) On this see: https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/4660700/jewish/Medication-on-Shabbat.htm and https://torah.org/torah-portion/weekly-halacha-5771-vayishlach/
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