Previously Untold, Escape From Auschwitz — 70 Year Old Son Publishes His Mother’s True Story, Fulfilling Her Last Wish
The important new book “Tatae’s Promise” (Sherry Maysonave and Moises Goldman) is an incredible and impactful tale of survival. Hinda Mondlak Goldman lived through years of heinous abuse at the Auschwitz concentration camp. She died in the arms of her son, Moises J. Goldman, PhD, on May 5, 1985. “My mother’s last wish was for me, her son, to tell her horrific and triumphant story in a public way,” Moises says with emotion.
“I have fulfilled that promise with this book, which tells my mother’s story of growing up in Poland, born ninth of eleven into a religious and devout family, to her experiencing cruel persecution and deep loss due to Hitler’s Nazi regime, World War II, and its far-reaching aftereffects. The war stole my mother’s home, her family, and what should have been happy teenage years. Even still, she not only survived Auschwitz but at the age of twenty-three, she escaped. And she got her younger sister out with her.”
In 1984, diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, “too weak to write and knowing that she did not have many months left to live, she recorded eleven tapes, forty-five minutes each, describing the war’s impact upon her life.” As painful as it was to recount and to listen to, Hinda was adamant that such horror should never again occur anywhere in the world, and she hoped her story would move people to support that aim.
In one of the powerful moments she recounts on the tapes, Hinda spoke of her father, whom she called Tatae (Yiddish for the word Father) and how, moments before being murdered by the Gestapo, he had written a note to her, leaving her with his blessing and a promise: ‘You will live; you will tell.’ Moises said those six words “rang in my mother’s ears and beat in her heart for the rest of her life. She wanted — with all her soul — to honor her father’s last behest.”
Moises, too, desperately wanted to honor both his mother’s and grandfather’s wishes that their story be told. But it wasn’t easy. “I had attempted to listen to the tapes many times, but hearing her voice and story always turned into such a heart-wrenching experience for me that I would have to stop. I could not finish them… Yet I knew that someday, if I were to fulfill her final wish, I would have to overcome my grief and listen to the entirety of the tapes. I tried time after time but I just couldn’t.”
It was so difficult for him to hear, in fact, that it took 35 years before he was able to translate the tapes into book form. His family friend, award winning Texas based author Sherry Maysonave expressed her abhorrence at what his mother had endured, and when he inquired about her interest in co-authoring the book, Sherry replied, “I feel the pulse of my soul in all this. I would be honored to write your mother’s story. It must be told. Such atrocities upon the Jews must never happen again.”
So they set to work.
“It was personally traumatic and extremely painful for me to listen to and transcribe more than eight hours of my mother’s recorded material,” said Moises, reflecting on the process. “It proved complicated, too, as she had spoken in multiple languages, primarily Spanish and Yiddish, which I had to translate to English. As I finished the initial few tapes, I got up from my office chair and went to my wife. I said, “Honey, I do not know if I can do it; this is going to kill me.” My wife answered, “It better not; your mother lived long enough to tell her story, so you had better do the same.”
So, Moises grandfather’s promise to his mother then became his own promise to her.
It is worth noting that on the very same day she died, President Ronald Reagan, touring the Bergen-Belson concentration camp with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said, “What we have seen makes unforgettably clear that no one of the rest of us can fully understand the enormity of the feelings carried by the victims of these camps. The survivors carry a memory beyond anything that we can comprehend.” He went on to say,
“People were brought here for no other purpose but to suffer and die — to go unfed when
hungry, uncared for when sick, tortured when the whim struck, and left to have misery consume them when all there was around them was misery. . . ”
This book brings us into the world of one of those brave survivors, both the tale of her escape from Auschwitz — and the story of how Hilda’s story came to the public eye packing a gutrenching emotional punch.
“I proudly say that my mother was extraordinarily bold and brave. I hope these pages of Tatae’s Promise will fill you with awe of her incredible spirit and triumph.”
Truly a must read.
The book is available for review and the authors are available for media interviews.
More information at : https://dartfrogbooks.com/tataes-promise/
Our deepest appreciation and most sincere thanks for the historical guidance of world-renowned Dr. Michael Berenbaum, a globally acknowledged expert on the Holocaust. Michael was the Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as President and CEO of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Michael is author and editor of twenty-four books, as well as Executive Editor of the Second Edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica. His work in film has won Academy Awards and Emmy Awards.
