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.
“The writing process was painful because it forced me to relive the childhood traumas that I experienced during the Second World War,” she told The AJN. “I hadn’t allowed myself to cry as a child, so it was in a way cathartic, but I felt the tears running down my face most of the time. I sensed that my message had to be told, for the children’s sake, and so I wrote on, in spite of the pain.”
“If I would have been negative and morose about my life during the war throughout my early childhood, I would not have survived. Of this, I am sure.”
But, she says, her book is addressing the world at large, knowing that while it’s the children who suffer, it’s the adults who are at fault.
“Mothers who must send off their eighteen-year-old children to fight wars and to kill other eighteen-year-old children of their ‘enemy’. Children who never instigated wars. They are innocent. This is the work of adults,” she said. “Until now, we grownups haven’t managed to resolve our international differences or our problems via peaceful means, and until we learn to do that, we will continue to be in this vicious circle of wars,” she continued. “And this is why I wrote my book.”
Goldtwig also shared that the cover photograph carries its own quiet heartbreak. It depicts Mala, a childhood friend who lost her entire family in the war and then disappeared from Goldtwig’s life. Decades later, she is still looking for her.
When asked if there was anything she wanted to add to The AJN readers, Goldtwig issued a direct appeal: “I call on our leaders, and on all mankind, lead your children into peace.”
She has, after all, seen the alternative.
The World Belongs to the Children is published by Affirm Press, $36.99rrp