Charlotte (Shaindel) Goldlist

Charlotte Goldlist (neé Liberman) was born on March 15, 1924 in Chmielnik, Kielce County, Poland. Her father, Joseph, worked as a tailor and her mother, Chana, was a homemaker. Along with her siblings Yitzhak (born 1925), Yankl (born 1929), Maria (born 1932) and Feivel (born 1935), Charlotte (who was known as Shaindel) had a comfortable, loving childhood.

She attended public school and was active in Hashomer Hatzair, a Socialist-Zionist, secular Jewish youth movement founded in 1913 in Galicia, Austria-Hungary. After the German occupation, Charlotte and her family were forced to live in the Chmielnik ghetto from 1939-142. Her parents and siblings were killed in an Aktion in October 1942 and Charlotte was deported to a concentration camp.
She survived the concentration camps of Skarżysko-Kamienna, Tschenstochau and Bergen-Belsen and was liberated at the latter camp by British armed forces in 1945.

Charlotte immigrated to Canada in 1948.

Charlotte Goldlist passed away on February 3, 2012. Her full testimony is part of the Canadian Collection of Holocaust survivor testimonies. It is preserved in the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive and accessible through the Ekstein Library.

Charlotte (Shaindel) Goldlist

They saw that you were not good for work; they took you and they shoot you.