Gold, Daniel

Daniel Gold was born in Lithuania on February 10, 1937.  When the war began for Lithuania – in 1941 – the country was quickly overrun by the Germans, and Lithuanian Jews were placed in ghettos, and not longer after the mass murder began.  Daniel remembers having to be quiet while Lithuanian neighbours were initiating the pogrom of 1941; he was in a ghetto from the age of 4, and as the terrible moment of liquidation approached, he was fortunate to escape alongside a few other members of his family.  They went into hiding for a time, literally in a hole in the ground under a barn – in unimaginable conditions.  They were liberated by the Soviet Red Army after several months.  It would take Daniel some time before he was able to leave Lithuania; he was then reunited with his father, who had survived the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau.  Daniel learned that his mother had been murdered during the war.  Father and son spent some time in Germany before making their way to Israel, where Daniel went to high school, and then the military, and then finally to Tel Aviv University, where he started his career in research and medicine.  In addition to that, and a long military career that saw him involved in several wars, he has been actively involved as an educator in Holocaust education.  We met Daniel Gold courtesy of Yad Vashem, who helped to set up a zoom interview with Mr. Masters and his students in the pandemic year of 2020.