A child’s witness to the shadow of war
A Warsaw-born survivor who fled the Nazis as a toddler has published her memoir at nearly 90. Raya Goldtwig believes it has never been more urgent to share her story.
Raya Goldtwig began writing her memoir in 1993. She is nearly 90 years old, and The World Belongs to the Children has finally been published.
The timing, she says, couldn’t feel more urgent.
“When I heard diplomatic leaders of countries starting to talk about strengthening alliances, with talk about the possibility of a third world war, I just had to do whatever I could,” Goldtwig said. “At my age I could only communicate my own experiences of war and plead for the children of our world for a change.”
Born in Warsaw in 1936, Goldtwig was three years old when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in August 1939. Together with her father, mother and brother, she fled across the border into Soviet territory. When Nazi Germany later invaded that territory too, the family fled again. She eventually lived in a refugee camp in Germany before arriving in Melbourne in 1950, speaking six languages. It has taken her until now to finally see her memoir published.
Goldtwig describes the writing process as emotionally gruelling; almost like a reckoning with decades of suppressed grief.
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