Samuel Goldstein

David Samuel Goldstein (who went by Samuel or Sami) was born on 18 November 1902 in the city of Oswiecim, the second child of Hirsch Leib Braun and Frieda Goldstein. He attended primary school in Oswiecim then moved to Bielsko-Biala to attend a technical high school. With both he and older brother Jakob likely to be conscripted into the newly reconstituted Polish army, they moved to Berlin in 1920 with the rest of the Goldstein family.

Samuel studied skilled dentistry under Martin Frey and between 1926 and 1933 was employed as first assistant to the dentist Leo Gruber on Lohringerstrasse. In April of 1933 he was ordered by the chief of Berlin police to leave the country, but with neither a Polish passport nor an official German ID card, he was forced to live undocumented for the next six years.

Later he estimated that he had been arrested ten or more times during those six years, often gaining his freedom by paying a large fine, but also by being incarcerated. Arrested again in 1938, he told the examining physician that he suffered from tuberculosis. When this was confirmed, Goldstein was given a six-month residency document that would allow him to secure a visa to leave Germany.

With the assistance of the German Jewish Aid Committee, he emigrated to England on 13 July 1939, just weeks before the war began. As a condition of his British entry, he was assigned to the Kitchener camp on the Kentish coast, just outside the town of Sandwich. Something of a Kinderstransport for adults, the Kitchener camp initiative ultimately gave refuge to some 4000 Jewish men from Austria and Germany.

Once the war began, those housed at Kitchener were considered enemy aliens and either had to enlist in the British Army or be moved to detention camps off England's southern coast. In 1940 Samuel Goldstein joined the army’s Pioneer Corps – comprised of Jewish men – serving until October 1941 when he was discharged for health reasons. He then worked as a dental mechanic for the duration of the war.

After 1945 Samuel Goldstein resided in the Tottenham section of London, eventually establishing a dental repair business at 35 West Green Road. He continued to live and work at that address until his death on 23 January 1972. His remains are interred at the Jewish cemetery in Waltham Abbey.

All five of the Goldstein siblings survived the Holocaust and never returned to Germany, living out their days in France (Jakob), England (Samuel), and the United States (Gusta, Regina, Salla).