Manfred Goldberg, below, is one of seven
Holocaust survivors to have their portraits
painted for a forthcoming royal exhibition.
Now in their nineties, they share their
darkest memories with Josh Glancy
The last
witnesses
M
anfred Goldberg will
never forget the day
his brother Herman
disappeared. It was
1943 and the two young
boys were imprisoned
in a Nazi slave labour camp for Jews outside
Riga, Latvia. Manfred, 13, was taken to work
each day, repairing railway tracks destroyed
by allied bombing. Herman, 9, was one of a
small group of younger children permitted
to stay in the camp during the day.
“One day we returned from work and
the children had gone,” Manfred recalls.
A member of the kitchen staff told them
that two SS men had come to the camp
that day and taken the children away.
Herman was never seen again. “It’s
practically certain these children were
dead before the end of the day,” says
Manfred, who spent much of the next 70
years searching for his brother, without
success. “Finally I had to confess to myself,
I had to accept he was dead.”
One remaining memory of Herman,
or Hermi as his family knew him, is a
small painted portrait that Manfred
commissioned from a photograph while
he was in Germany in 1945, recovering from
a bout of tuberculosis at the Lensterhof
convalescence home, where he’d been sent
by the British Army. He pulls the portrait
from the wall of his family home in Hendon,
northeast London, to show me. Hermi is
blond, angelic, smiling. “I always hoped
for a miracle,” says Manfred. “But the day
Herman disappeared, he disappeared from
the face of the earth.”
This week a second portrait of a family
member will join that of Hermi. Manfred
is one of seven Holocaust survivors who
have been painted by seven portrait artists
commissioned by Prince Charles, part of
a special project that aims to capture these
extraordinary witnesses, all of them now
in their nineties, whose childhoodsThe artist Clara
Drummond works
on her study of
Manfred for the
project backed by
the Prince of WalesThe Sunday Times Magazine • 19