Two Pieces of Cloth recalls the remarkable Holocaust survival story of a Vancouver fabric legend
Joe Gold writes the story his father was never able to pen in his lifetime
Joe Gold
David and Aurelia Goldenberger
IN HIS YEARS growing up as the son of a busy textile retailer in Vancouver, Joe Gold would often hear his father talk about wanting to write a book about his extraordinary life.
Czechoslovakia-born “Deszy” Gold, the entrepreneur behind the longtime Granville Street landmark Gold’s Fashion Fabrics, had rebuilt his life here after escaping death not just at Auschwitz but later at Bergen-Belsen during the Second World War. He had even managed to hide away his wife and baby, Joe’s mother and older brother, as Christians in Budapest, the infant boy disguised as a girl.
After researching and writing his moving new book about that journey, Two Pieces of Cloth: One Family’s Story of the Holocaust, his son Joe Gold even came across three hand-written pages where his father had once tried to start the project.
The title the family patriarch had written on those three pages speaks poignantly to what got him through a living nightmare as a young man: “Always be an optimist”.
“He didn’t think in negative terms his whole life, he was always very positive; he said, ‘As long as you want it you can accomplish it,’” Gold tells Stir.
“He’d already been through so much as a child. He grew up very poor; his mother died very young,” he says, pointing to a school photograph reproduced in the book that pictures David, whose last name was then Goldberger, as the only child in his class in bare feet. “My father had an ability to circumvent that trauma and get on with things.”
Now his son has completed the book his father never wrote, choosing to tell the story in Two Pieces of Cloth in David’s and his wife’s first-person voices. Through meticulous research of archival documents, and first-person accounts—including a recorded interview of his father by Dr. Robert Krell, founding president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre—he pieces together David’s journey. It goes from managing a thriving textile business in Bratislava to suffering under Aryanization laws, to being transported by cattle car to Auschwitz. From that living hell, David is deemed strong enough to be sent to a labour camp, before imprisonment at Bergen-Belsen in the dying days of the war.
Among the most tense and surprising parts of the book come when Bergen-Belsen is finally “liberated” in 1945. Weighing just 65 pounds, David remains caught there as typhus rages through the camp; guards refuse to let him and the others leave due to the disease. Although he’s finally able to lead an escape, taking 18 young men with him, David’s battle to rebuild his life has only just begun. Penniless, he faces poverty and overt racism trying to start his textile business over again, finally heading with his family to Vancouver in 1948 to start from scratch for a final time.
Born in 1947 while the family was still in Eastern Europe, Gold reflects that multiple factors meant his father never got around to completing a book himself. “He was very, very, very busy in his life, and English wasn’t his first language,” Gold reflects. “Also, try to imagine yourself in a position where all the things that you had were taken away from you, and just imagine if 100 of your family and closest friends were gone. I think it was just too hard for him to write the book.”
Gold was inspired to take on the project as a legacy to his children and grandchildren. Writing it was tremendously rewarding, but not easy.
“I had so many mixed emotions,” he relates. “I also felt very helpless because I couldn’t do anything—I couldn’t talk to my parents about it even if I wanted to.”
Amid his research, Gold unearthed painfully specific details—including the exact rations at his father’s prison camp (half a litre of imitation coffee for breakfast, turnip soup for lunch, black bread for dinner), or the way inmates would use empty paper cement bags in a desperate attempt to insulate their thin clothing against the cold. Piecing together the journey was like putting together an intricate puzzle, he says.
Along the way, Gold found a new, aching empathy for what his parents had been through—and a fresh perspective on growing up as a child of immigrants in Vancouver.
“Going back, I remember the way I felt as a kid whenever my parents spoke to my friends. I was actually ashamed of my parents’ accents,” he reflects with emotion. “I wanted them to sound like everybody else.”
Like so many who survived the Holocaust, Gold’s parents never spoke much about their traumatic experiences. He remembers hearing snippets of stories. His father would sometimes talk about how there was not a blade of grass at Bergen-Belsen, Gold recalls, and how he would have given almost anything to have a single one—if only to eat it out of his starvation. He remembers Passover dinners where his father and uncle would comment that you didn’t have to go back thousands of years to Egypt to see the enslavement of Jewish people—they had experienced it firsthand in their lifetimes.
Only later in life did he come to fully comprehend the horror that his mother, in hiding in Budapest but witness to fellow Jews being shipped away to concentration camps, would have gone through.
“At a very young age, there was this almost daily ritual where my mom would go into a deep trance and repeat two words, just as people do when they’re meditating,” he says, referring to the Hungarian phrase “Ishta nem”, which he didn’t understand at the time. “I could go right in front of her and wave my hands. I didn't understand it. I did my best to jump around and do funny things, and for a few minutes she would be somewhere else.”
It wasn’t until 2007, when Gold was 60, that a guide at a Holocaust museum told him what the words “ishta nem” meant. “She said, ‘Oh my gosh, those are the words that were cried out loud at the train station where they loaded them into the cattle cars,” he says.
“So I was 60 when I realized, ‘I wish I had had more empathy,’” he reflects.
But Gold has happy memories he’s grateful for, including growing up amid the textile rolls of his family’s fabric store. In the book he writes of his Sundays spent there: “While my dad busied himself around the store, I worked ‘my job’ at the thread and zipper displays. The thread display was beautiful: row upon row of bright colours, each with a number.”
Growing to 20,000 feet by the early 1970s, the Granville Street outlet was a thriving business out of a bygone era, when everyone sewed their own clothes.
Gold also has fond memories of going to Winston Churchill Secondary School—and he’s thrilled that, under the First Book Canada program, 100 copies of Two Pieces of Cloth went to students there. He spoke about his novel at his alma mater in April. (Gold would later go on to UBC, and then careers in real estate, management, and software.)
The First Book project, an audiobook with interviews and original music, and the full website that accompanies the book at twopiecesofcloth.com, aim to offer lessons to a new generation from the racism and oppression in history. “One of the things I was hoping to do with this book is draw attention to the issues and when things go wrong, for people to stand up for rights,” he says. The book also raises the funds for the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
He’s also achieved the written legacy for future generations of his own family that his own father was never able to complete.
Again, it makes Gold, late in life, reflect on the way he saw things growing up, the new light he sees them in now, and the importance of family bonds.
“As a kid, I wondered, ‘Why don’t I have grandparents? Why do I just have an uncle and aunt and one cousin here? Most of my friends had grandparents,” he says. "And I am a grandparent now to nine grandchildren and I realize how important we are to our grandchildren!”
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