H EADLINES
Love Gave Couples Hope During Holocaust
NATIONAL SOPHIE PANZER | JE STAFF
REGINA GOODMAN and
Sam Spiegel’s fi rst meeting and
early relationship had many
hallmarks of ordinary teenage
love: friendship, fl irting and
fi nding ways to be alone
together. Less ordinary is the fact that
they met in a forced labor camp
in Pionki, Poland, during the
Nazi occupation.

Th e United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum shared
their love story during “Acts
of Resistance: Love Stories and
the Holocaust.” Th e Facebook
Live event, which was hosted
by museum historians Lindsay
MacNeill and Edna Friedberg,
was part of the Stay Connected
project, a series of Holocaust
education webinars created
in the absence of in-person
programming. MacNeill said Goodman
and Spiegel found ways to meet
and talk at the water spigot
even though men and women
were supposed to be kept apart.

“One time, Sam said he
received 12 lashes for talking
to Regina, but he said it was
worth it,” she said.

The young lovers were
separated at the end of the war
when the Germans loaded
prisoners onto cattle cars and
transported them to Auschwitz-
Birkenau. Before they were forced
into their gender-segregated
sections of the concentration
camp, Spiegel told Goodman
to meet him in his hometown,
Kozienice, if she survived. Th ey
were moved around various
labor camps until liberation,
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when they returned to their
respective hometowns to search
for their families.

When Spiegel learned
Goodman had survived, he sent
a horse and buggy to bring her
to Kozienice, and the two were
married in a displaced persons
camp in Germany shortly aft er.

Th ey stayed together for 70 years.

William Luksenburg and
Helen Chilewicz met under
similar circumstances, talking
through a fence in the Gleiwitz
labor camp between their
barracks and writing letters
to each other. Luksenburg
promised Chilewicz that they
would survive the war and he
would marry her.

His prediction came true,
and they wed in a displaced
persons camp in 1947. During
the ceremony, the rabbi
recited a prayer in honor of
their family members, most of
whom had been murdered, and
the couple bowed their heads in
grief. Th ey later immigrated to
the United States and became
volunteers at the USHMM.

MacNeill also told the
story of an interfaith family
whose love helped save Jewish
members from deportation.

When the Nazis came to
power, they encouraged Aryan
women with Jewish husbands
to divorce their spouses in the
name of racial purity. Hedwig
Gluckstein, however, refused
to leave her Jewish husband,
Georg Gluckstein, and their
son Fritz. When father and
son were rounded up by the
Gestapo in Berlin, she joined
hundreds of other Aryan
women outside the detention
center in what became known
as the Rosenstrasse Protest to
demand the release of their
loved ones.

Everyone in the center was
eventually released. Although
Georg and Fritz Gluckstein
had to perform forced labor,
they were not deported to
death camps.

“Of the 73,000 Jews who
JEWISH EXPONENT
William and Helen Luksenburg at their wedding in 1947
Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
and William and Helen Luksenburg
were living in Berlin in October
of 1941 when deportations
began, only 8,300 survived
the Holocaust. And of that
small number, half of them
were in these types of inter-
married families, they were
married to somebody who was
categorized as Aryan or they
were categorized like Fritz as
mixed race. So Hedwig and
women like her, who stayed in
these marriages, this act of love
might have really saved the
lives of thousands of people,”
she said.

Many other couples did not
make it through the war.

MacNeill said LGBTQ
couples were
especially vulnerable, and gay men were
persecuted as enemies of the
Reich. Gad Beck and Manfred
Lewin managed to have a
romance in the midst of tragedy.

Th ey met in a Jewish youth
group and signed up for air raid
patrol so they could spend time
alone together. MacNeill and
Feinberg showed a booklet of
love notes and sketches Lewin
created for Beck, which now sits
in the museum’s archives.

“Night exists for more than
sleep which is why, my love,
we stayed awake so oft en,” an
excerpt reads.

When Lewin and his family
were summoned for depor-
tation, Beck donned a Hitler
Youth uniform and demanded
a meeting with him (he was
protected by his half-Aryan
status.) Once he and Lewin
were alone, he begged him to
run away with him and go into
hiding, but Lewin wouldn’t
leave his family. Th ey boarded
a train east, and Beck never
saw his love again; records
show Lewin and his family
were gassed at Auschwitz.

Friedberg posted a link to
Lewin’s booklet for viewers to
examine. “You can actually kind of
do a fl ipbook, go through it
and see the various drawings,
the passionate, romantic,
maybe not the most sophisti-
cated teenage love poetry that’s
in there, but something that
just really drives home what
this relationship meant as a
solace and sustenance to these
teenagers,” she said. ●
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