Ernst Michael Goldschmidt, christian name Michael, was born on December 5, 1936, in Frankfurt. He lived with his parents and his sister in Schumannstraße 10 in Frankfurt's upscale Westend.

Michael's mother Thea Goldschmidt was active in the Jewish Women's Association, and so it was that she helped Bertha Pappenheim and her successor Helene Krämer in „Heim Isenburg" as a secretary.

In early November 1938 Thea Goldschmidt temporarily left the nearly two-year-old Michael to the care of the Neu-Isenburger home to proceed on the search for her parents, Eduard and Jenny Jammer. They had been pushed off during the constraint expulsion ordered by the NS government of Polish Jews from the German Empire at the end of October 1938, as supposed Polish citizens from her native town Dortmund were forced to the Polish. Because the Polish government refused the admission, the married Jammer couple was sent back after days of endurance in the border area under inhumane conditions in a cattle transport to Dortmund.

At the time, when his mother was looking for her parents, Michael Goldschmidt was exposed to threatening violence in „Heim Isenburg.“ In the evening, during the November pogrom of 1938, the main building of „Heim Isenburg" was set on fire, only dressed in night clothes the children had to watch from the yard. The two-year-old Michael suffered a screaming fit and had to be treated by a doctor over several days.

Michael's father could not help his son. He was arrested during the pogrom and deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. This measure was to force the Jewish families to leave the country. When the father returned on December 7, 1938, from the concentration camp, he was badly marked by the imprisonment, emaciated and balded shaved. Michael no longer recognized his father.

Until the end of May 1939, Michael lived together with his mother at the Home of the Jewish Women's Association. In June 1939 he was separated again from his parents and was sent to England in a children's transportation together with his six-year-old sister Eva. There, the sister left him - from the point of view of the small boy - because the children were accommodated in different families. They lived close to Manchester in the same town so that the brother and sister could visit themselves regularly. Michael was taken up by a Methodist's family, his sister by Quakers.

Finally, Michael's parents succeeded the escape on separate ways also to England. Thea Goldschmidt took two-year-old Michael soon after her arrival to herself; Eva remained in her foster home for some time. Michael's father was affected again by persecution in England. He was interned as an enemy alien and brought to Australia to a prison camp. Only in 1943, the family was united again in England and survived the Second World War there.

Michael Goldschmidt's grandfather, Eduard Jammer, was deported after the November pogrom in 1938 to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he died on September 26, 1941. His grandmother, Jenny Jammer, survived. After the war, she first lived temporarily with the Goldschmidts in England, then visited her daughter Margot in New Zealand and finally moved to Australia to her brothers. There Jenny Jammer died on June 3, 1952.

Michael Goldschmidt finished an education in the agriculture after the Second World War in England. At the age of 20 years, he moved to New Zealand in 1956. There he went to visit his aunt Margot and gathered several years of life and work experience. Michael Goldschmidt found a new home in New Zealand. He lives there today with his wife.

The biography could be supplemented with the support of Ernst Michael Goldschmidt who also gave the approval to lift the anonymity of his personal data.

Additional sources: Stadtarchiv Neu-Isenburg; Hessian State Archives