The Strength of Hope

The Strength of Hope: A Holocaust Survivor’s Guide to Love and Life

One of most uplifting stories you will ever read. Abram Goldberg is a beacon of joy and optimism, and a master of keeping perspective.

When Abram and his mother arrived at Auschwitz death camp, after being deported from the Lodz Ghetto, they both knew this day would be her last. In their final moments together, Abram’s mum urged her nineteen-year-old son to ‘do everything humanly possible to survive, and tell people what happened here.’ Seconds later she was taken to the gas chambers where she was subsequently murdered. Abram had already endured and survived so much until that moment: being smuggled across Poland on the back of a horse drawn sled with his parents, locked into a ghetto, starved and forced into hiding in a tiny space above the ceiling with his mother for four weeks. But with his strength of hope, sometimes reduced to just a flicker, and a great deal of luck, he survived. Other than one of his three sisters, the rest of his immediate and extended family did not.

After liberation, Abram travelled back and forth across Europe, doing secret underground work for The Bund, and getting into dangerous scrapes including the night he and his friend were locked in a dungeon with a Nazi. Abram eventually found his way to Belgium, where he met his kindred spirit and the love of his love, fellow Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz survivor, Cesia. The young couple soon made their way to Australia, where that flicker of hope grew as bright as the sun, illuminating everything they touched and everyone who came into their sphere. Without bitterness and always with perspective, Abram has never forgotten his mother’s last words to him. And in their seventy-five years of marriage, Abram and Cesia have created their own family together, remained dedicated to educating people about the holocaust and to living their lives to the fullest in tribute to its victims.

The Strength of Hope is full of wisdom, insight, and extraordinary resourcefulness, but at its heart it is a love story: for Cesia, for Australia and for life itself.

All royalties from the sale of this book are going to the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne, which Abram helped found in 1984.