Stanford English lecturer Hilton Obenzinger grew up hearing fragments of his aunt’s Holocaust story around the family dinner table. But it wasn’t until he interviewed Zosia Goldberg in 1979—taping her as they strolled together on the sidewalks of New York—that he began to understand the full horror of her ordeal.
In a new book, Running Through Fire: How I Survived the Holocaust (Mercury House, 2004), Obenzinger shares his aunt’s gripping first-person account of her persecution and escape through the sewers of Warsaw. “She’s an incredible, vigorous storyteller,” says Obenzinger, who advises Stanford students on their honors theses in his role as associate director of undergraduate research programs.
Goldberg’s experience is similar to that of Wladyslaw Szpilman, the Polish musician whose story was retold in the Academy Award-winning film The Pianist. In fact, Goldberg worked as a waitress in one of the Warsaw cafes where Szpilman regularly performed. Like the pianist, Goldberg survived the Holocaust through a combination of extraordinary good luck and assistance from friends, co-workers and acquaintances, both Polish and German. She was also bold and extremely shrewd—traits that served her well in repeated brushes with death.
At one point in the book, for example, Goldberg describes an incident when the German ss came to a Warsaw Ghetto factory where she and her mother were working and announced that everyone over 40 would have to leave. “My [late] father had prepared Polish passports for us, just in case,” she recalls. “So I falsified the passport, making out that my mother was 33 years old. [She was actually in her late 40s.] Then I painted her face, braided her hair around her head. When I think how she looked—like an idiot, not young but grotesque, the way I fixed her up. And I combed my hair in this à la Gretchen style, a German hairstyle.”
With narrative like that, Obenzinger felt it was natural that excerpts be read aloud onstage. Working with Stanford’s Department of Drama, he auditioned several students to read the part of his aunt. The honor went to Audrey Hannah, a graduating senior whose maternal grandmother survived the Holocaust by fleeing to El Salvador. In June, they traveled to New York for a performance with Goldberg herself in attendance. Now 85, the fiery old woman is “a little nervous” about all the attention, Obenzinger says. Still, “Her story is one testimony, one piece of evidence. We hope the deductions people draw will lead them toward life and peace.”
