Aged 95, Manfred Goldberg died in London on November 6, 2025. Only a few weeks earlier, on September 10, he had been invested by King Charles III with the MBE, becoming a member of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of his “services to Holocaust remembrance and education.” Just in time, Britain had awarded him the honor he so fully deserved.
Investitures usually take place in Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle. In recognition of Goldberg’s advanced years and ill health, the king invited him to a private audience in his London residence, Clarence House, for a personal ceremony, attended only by Goldberg and members of his family.
Goldberg, a Holocaust survivor, had dedicated the past 20 years to educating the world in general, and schoolchildren in particular, about the genocide of European Jews during World War II.
For most of his working life, latterly as an electronics engineer, the thought of speaking publicly about his wartime experiences was, he once said, “unthinkable to me.” He was induced to change his mind by the resurgence of antisemitism and Holocaust denial in the 21st century. Pressured to give his testimony by his synagogue – and by his wife to refrain from saying “No” immediately – he succumbed.
“Weeks before a talk,” he recalled, “I would have sleepless nights dredging these thoughts to the forefront of my mind.”
He captivated his audiences, both young and old, with his personality and his detailed and precise recollections. In 2024, the Holocaust Educational Trust chose him as the first survivor to take part in Testimony 360.
This involved his answering more than 1,000 questions on camera so that, even in the far future, AI would allow him to provide answers to schoolchildren who asked him about the Holocaust.
“I have spoken to thousands of pupils over the years,” he remarked at the time. “Perhaps now I will make it millions.”
Various branches of government
He was also asked to speak to various branches of government, including the Home Office, Foreign Office, and a “special department” that turned out to be MI6, in an auditorium named after Frank Foley, the British official who had issued 10,000 visas to Jewish refugees, including Manfred’s father.
Foley helped thousands of Jewish families escape from Nazi Germany before the outbreak of the Second World War. He is officially recognized as a British Hero of the Holocaust, and as Righteous Among the Nations.
Manfred Goldberg, the older of two boys, was born on April 21, 1930, in Kassel, Germany, into a close, observant Jewish family. His father, Baruch – "Benno" to friends – had grown up in Galicia. During World War I, he slipped out of Poland rather than submit to a draft infamous for its harshness toward Orthodox Jews. Kassel became his refuge, and there he married Rosa Seeman, a young woman from his Polish community.
The family’s calm existence was shattered after Kristallnacht in November 1938. Manfred, still a primary school pupil, was forced with his classmates to sweep up the charred remains of a burnt synagogue – his first, unforgettable encounter with hatred made visible.
By the spring of 1939, the blows fell harder: Baruch was deported to Poland, only to be driven back into the forest by Polish forces determined to expel Jews. Through determination and luck, he made his way to Berlin. There, Rosa persuaded a British passport officer – later revealed to be Frank Foley, the MI6 officer who quietly saved thousands – to grant him a precious visa to the United Kingdom just a few days before the outbreak of World War II.
Baruch traveled to England, but on September 1 Germany invaded Poland, trapping Manfred, his mother, and brother in Kassel.
They survived until December 1941, but eventually they were rounded up and all three were deported east to the Riga Ghetto. Forty small houses were assigned to 1,000 new arrivals. It was 25 people to a cottage. Manfred noticed bowls of half-eaten soup on the tables.
Only later did it emerge that a few days before, 28,000 Jews had been marched to the nearby forest and massacred.
Mass shootings
Throughout Manfred’s time in the ghetto, the Nazis and their Latvian collaborators regularly selected inmates for mass shootings in the forests on the edge of the city. It was in this febrile atmosphere that Manfred secretly celebrated his bar mitzvah in March 1943.
By August 1943, Manfred was in the Precu labor camp, assigned the number 56478. His hair was shaved, and he was set to work laying railway tracks while guards lashed out at the slave laborers with poles studded with nails. One day, his nine-year-old brother, Hermann, judged too young to work, simply disappeared. “Fate unknown” is his epitaph.
A year later came the selection. The prisoners, stripped and shivering, were divided by SS men into two groups with a gesture. The man behind 14-year-old Manfred leaned forward and whispered, “Say you’re 17.” That quiet stranger, who Manfred came to think of as an angel, saved his life. Manfred was pushed into the line for forced labor; his mother into the one marked for death. Amid a moment of chaos she darted across to him, an act of desperate courage that kept them together.
Skin and bone
Manfred worked wherever he was placed until he was sent to the overcrowded hell of the SS-administered Stutthof concentration camp. “It wasn’t unusual,” he would recall, “to see someone reduced to skin and bone shuffling toward the electric fence, hoping to end the pain.”
In April 1945, mother and son were driven onto a death march to the sea, and then packed with thousands onto barges for six freezing days. Back on land another march followed, until suddenly, around a bend in the road, they found themselves facing British tanks. The SS scattered. Food was handed out. Manfred and his mother dared eat only dry bread; many others, maddened by hunger, ate too much and collapsed, their bodies unable to bear the shock.
Finally reunited with Baruch in north London, Manfred began the long work of rebuilding a life. He studied at a cram school, worked in a Jewish bakery, and later as an electrician’s mate, before earning a degree in light electronics from Northampton Polytechnic.
In 1958, he joined Associated Electrical Industries, developing advanced transistors, and later started his own central heating business. A life nearly extinguished became, through resilience and love, a life reclaimed.
In 1961, he met his wife, Shary, and they went on to have four sons, several grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
Power of education
“Manfred understood the power of education,” said Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust. “He spent decades sharing his story with young people across the country.” And beyond. In his final years, he revisited Germany and addressed an audience of rapt schoolchildren, who gave him a standing ovation.
“I’m only a drop in the ocean,” he once said. “But I’ve made up my mind that as long as God gives me the strength, physical and mental, to continue doing it, I have committed myself to keep on doing it.”
When visiting a school in Newport, Wales, on 27 January 2025, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day marked the 80-year anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, he told pupils: “My purpose for coming here is because what happened must never be forgotten, in order to make sure it can never ever happen again.”
Following Manfred’s death, King Charles III issued a public message of condolence.
“It meant more to me than I can ever say,” the monarch wrote, “to have been able to wish the fondest of farewells, a few weeks ago, to a truly special human being, in whose eyes shone the light of true redemption and humanity.”