Ann Benjamin Goldberg papers

The collection consists of a health card, certificate issued in Bremen, Germany, and photographs depicting Ann Benjamin Goldberg's family in Dyatlovo, Poland (Dzi︠a︡tlava, Belarus) before the Holocaust, her time as a student in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, and her stay and work as a nurse in Zeilsheim displaced persons camp in Germany after World War II. Additional photographs depict visits to the Föhrenwald and Eschwege displaced persons camps. Ann Benjamin Goldberg, M.D. (1923-2006) was born Chana Benjaminowicz on May 5, 1923, in Dyatlovo, Poland (Dzi︠a︡tlava, Belarus). The town, in which 3,000 residents out of a total of 5,000 were Jewish, was known as Zetel and is located southwest of Minsk, Belarus. Chana’s father, Itzak (Isaac), was a tailor and her mother, Riva (Rebecca), took care of the children. Chana had an older sister, Zlata (b. 1922), and a younger brother, Chaim. On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and Chana fled eastwards from Zetel with a group of her schoolmates. She eventually arrived in Aktyubinsk in southern Siberia where she attended nursing school and worked in a sanatorium. Upon graduation from nursing school, she was selected to study at a university. In 1942 Chana moved to Alma-Ata, capital of Kazakhstan, where she continued her education. In the summer of 1944, Chana received a letter from her hometown in which she was notified that her father, who had joined the partisans, had been killed in action and her mother and siblings had perished in the Zetel ghetto. The Germans murdered thirty-eight members of Ann’s family during World War II. She returned to Zetel during the summer of 1945 and decided to leave Poland. In January 1946 she entered Zeilsheim DP camp in Germany and started working as a nurse in the camp’s clinic. Soon after her arrival, Ann entered medical school at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She graduated in 1948, and in March 1949 she sailed aboard the SS Captain Muir for New York. Later that year, Dr. Ann Benjamin married Julius Lewis Goldberg, CPA. He passed away in 1987. Ann became certified as a physician in the US and practiced medicine until her retirement in 1989. Their son, Ronald Goldberg, lives with his two children, Ilyse and Melissa, in Nyack, NY. Dr. Ann Benjamin Goldberg currently resides in Huntington, NY.