Holocaust survivor Manfred Goldberg has died aged 95.
He was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Germany in April 1930 – and suffered escalating persecution under the Nazi regime.
When Manfred was just 11 years old, he was deported to a ghetto in Latvia “characterised by a lack of food, use of slave labour and constant fear”.
According to the Holocaust Educational Trust, inmates were regularly selected for mass shootings in forests on the edge of Riga.
He was evacuated to Stutthof concentration camp near the Polish city of Gdansk in 1944 – and spent eight months as a slave worker.
Manfred was liberated at Neustadt in Germany on 3 May 1945 and came to Britain to be reunited with his father a year later.
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The Holocaust Educational Trust has paid tribute to a man who dedicated his life to ensuring “the atrocities of the Holocaust would never be forgotten, and antisemitism in all its guises would be confronted”.
Over decades of championing Holocaust education, Mr Goldberg met the King, Prince and Princess of Wales and Sir Keir Starmer – and he was honoured with an MBE in September.
The trust’s chief executive, Karen Pollock, described him as “truly extraordinary” – and said his death “leaves an irreplaceable void in our hearts”.
She added: “We will deeply miss Manfred – his kindness, his encouragement, wisdom and his gentle guidance.
“He was a true Tzadik – a righteous – and we will strive harder than ever in his name to continue his mission.”
In 2018, he returned to Germany to lay a memorial stone for his brother Herman, who was killed during the Holocaust.
Mr Goldberg also participated in an initiative that allows school students to understand the horrors of the Holocaust by “talking” to survivors using artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
He spent five days being filmed within a green screen rig and answered more than 1,000 questions to ensure his virtual self could respond to almost any question a student may pose.
This means pupils wearing VR headsets are given the feeling of having a natural conversation.
Ms Pollock said “this programme will ensure that his incredible testimony will continue to reach generations of students for many years to come”.
On Holocaust Memorial Day in 2023, Mr Goldberg described the “highly ingenuous methods of preserving testimony given by survivors” as crucial.
At the time, he told Sky News: “I’m amazed that hundreds of thousands of people are denying that the Holocaust ever happened while survivors like me, who can speak in the first person, are still alive.
“That is a fact today. I feel that it would be extremely dangerous and have consequences if the Holocaust was relegated to just a footnote in history.
“It is absolutely vital to keep that horrific experience – which I believe was unprecedented in the history of humanity – alive in order to make people aware of what hate can lead to.
“I think that, in one way or another, people will achieve what we are saying, that the memory must be kept in front of people.”
Mr Goldberg was married with four sons, several grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
