Heide Engelhardt Golden, born in 1941 in Gablingen, Germany, a small farming village near Augsburg, recalls living conditions in the years immediately following World War II. She was the middle child of three daughters. Her father, Karl Engelhardt, who served in the German army, died just before the end of the war. Struggling to care for her three children, Heide’s mother, Anna Heilman Engelhardt, sent Heide, age five, to live with her paternal grandmother. Heide rejoined the family around the time her mother married James Hull, an American soldier, in 1948. The following year, while the family was living on an American base in Augsburg, Heide’s half-brother was born. When James’s unit was assigned to Korea in 1952, the U.S. Army sent Anna and the children to Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina. Heide describes adjusting to life in Columbia, her schooling, and working for Eddie and Sarah Picow in their store, Allan’s, where she met her husband, Harvey Golden, a Jewish lawyer originally from Brooklyn, New York. Around 1943 Harvey had moved with his parents, Gertrude and Jack Golden, to Columbia, where they operated an army-navy store. Before marrying Harvey in 1962, Heide studied with Rabbi Abraham Herson of Columbia’s Conservative synagogue, Beth Shalom, and converted to Judaism. The interviewee discusses their three children, Holly, Karl, and Jared; Harvey’s involvement in local theater; race relations in Columbia in the 1960s; and the family’s religious practices. Holly was the first girl in Beth Shalom to have her bat mitzvah ceremony on a Saturday. Heide talks about racial integration in Columbia; working for the department store Berry’s on Main; and flying home from Germany on September 11, 2001, when her plane was grounded in Newfoundland, Canada, after terrorists had flown hijacked jets into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. Heide recalls being shocked when she learned about the Holocaust and was surprised when her mother told her neither she nor Heide’s father knew about the concentration camps. During and after the war, ordinary Germans like her mother lived in fear of being reported to the police by their neighbors for saying or doing the wrong thing. Despite that, the one Jewish family that lived in their village, remained there throughout the war.
