Born in Berlin in 1938, Evelyn Goldstein attended a Jewish kindergarten. Her parents Herta and Ernst Goldstein performed forced labor. The family went into “illegal” hiding at the beginning of March 1943. They initially stayed in their building’s attic and later hid with their trusted friend Christine Engler. When the threat of discovery grew, they had to hide separately. Engler’s niece Hildegard Knies took in Evelyn for several months and also placed her with various acquaintances.
At the end of June 1943, Knies and her friends found a safe place for the child in the Bunke family’s house in the East Prussian countryside. A few days after Evelyn’s departure, her father was arrested in Berlin. Her mother followed her to East Prussia in February 1944 and was also taken in by the Bunkes. At the end of the war, Herta and Evelyn Goldstein were hiding with a family of farm workers in the East Prussian village of Gamsau (Podgornoye).
After the Red Army invaded East Prussia, they were not able to return from the Soviet Union to Berlin until 1948. Mother and daughter emigrated to the United States in 1950. Evy Woods lived in Washington State with her second husband.
Evelyn Goldstein while already living in hiding in Berlin, 1943. Source: Privatbesitz/Private
Evelyn Goldstein with the son of the Bunke family, with whom she lived under a false identity, Blöstau (now Vishnevka), around 1944. Source: Privatbesitz/Private
Hildegard Knies with Evelyn Goldstein, Berlin, 1949. Source: Privatbesitz/Private
Welcome party for Evy Woods and her husband at Berlin’s Tempelhof airport, left to right: Hildegard Arnold, Evy Woods (with headscarf), her husband Gordon, Dorothee Arnold (front), Elisabeth Abegg, and Liselotte Pereles, May 24, 1964. Source: Privatbesitz/Private
