It was a story that unfolded over 80 years ago, was kept secret for decades and was finally divulged with a belated hakarat hatov as part of a Yom HaShoah 2025 commemoration. The reveal took place at an April 27 breakfast in a ballroom at Shomrei Torah in Fair Lawn. Member Lenny Goldsmith coordinated the event and was the lone speaker, since it was his family’s story. You could say he was on a mission. He and his wife have lived in town for 40 years, but only recently did he attempt to fully reconstruct a series of events involving his grandmother, based on bits and pieces shared by his father, Yad Vashem records and a feverish search through archives.

It began in Nazi Germany. It was 1939 and Lenny’s grandmother, Julchen Kanthal Goldschmidt, was a widow with three young children. As conditions grew more desperate, she sent them away on a Kindertransport to Amsterdam with the hope of saving them. The oldest, Lenny’s father, secured a sponsored visa to come to America, which allowed him to board a ship from Amsterdam to New York. The two younger awaited an adoption that never materialized. Instead, they were taken to the Sobibor death camp when the Germans invaded Holland in 1940. Only recently did Lenny and his wife Esti receive confirmation that they had been killed there.

Meanwhile, left alone, his grandmother, a scrappy businesswoman, fended for herself for a while but was eventually taken by the Nazis and in 1941 was sent to the Riga, Latvia, ghetto, which was converted into a concentration camp. At the time she was 43 years old and in relatively good health. Unfortunately, the relentless hard labor and spread of disease in close quarters took its toll. Within two years, his grandmother’s health had deteriorated greatly. She barely clung to life.

It was then that two 18-year-old girls in the barracks came to the rescue of this total stranger, befriending her and protecting her from the German soldiers as best they could. They shared their meager rations, helped dress her and prop her up for roll calls and took on her chores in an attempt to nurse her back to health, all the while putting their own lives at risk. Unfortunately, despite all those efforts, her health continued to deteriorate and the ruse didn’t last. Since she was of no use to them, the Nazis ended her life and had those same teenage girls carry out her body.

Lenny’s father was the only member of the nuclear family to survive. His sponsor was William Rosenwald, a distant relative and son of one of the founders of Sears, Roebuck and Company, Julies Rosenwald. William Rosenwald had his own mission, to rescue relatives and others impacted by the Nazis, bring them to the United States and provide them with work and a place to live. He did so for 300 individuals, with the understanding that once they settled in the U. S., were given room and board and passed their citizenship exams, they would move to Minneapolis and work for Sears. Lenny’s father spent his time acclimating to the U.S. in New York, but when he gained citizenship and was asked by Rosenwald to move to Minneapolis to begin a career at Sears, he inquired if it would involve working on Saturdays. When told that as a retail store, of course it would, he refused, following a promise he had made while still in Europe to follow his family’s tradition and remain shomer Shabbat at all costs. The cost was heavy indeed. He had been regularly corresponding with his mother up until the time she was sent to the concentration camp. In her letters, she begged him to get her out of Europe, but as a teenager alone in New York, he didn’t have the contacts nor the capacity to raise the needed funds. His inability to save his mother haunted him for the rest of his life. He never spoke of it to Lenny, who learned about it from his own mother.

That’s why it took Lenny so long to piece together the details of the story so he could finally offer a proper hakarat hatov. In a twist—some might call it Yad Hashem—the two girls who did their all to comfort Lenny’s grandmother, Inge Nussbaum and Eva Lowenberg, although no longer with us, had children who also live in Fair Lawn and in fact have lived there for decades. It is for those children and their wives, David and Linda Heiser and Michael and Gitty Bender, that Lenny offered his thanks in place of David’s and Michael’s mothers. In fact, the ballroom mentioned at the story’s outset where this event took place, is known as the Inge and Fred Heiser ballroom, the same Inge who, with her friend, Eva, risked her life for Lenny’s grandmother so many years ago.