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“This is a meticulous and finely written account of Dina Gold’s struggle to seek belated justice for her mother, with all the twists and turns one would expect from a fictional detective story — but it is all true.”

—E. Randol Schoenberg
Attorney (“Woman in Gold”)

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About the Book

When Dina Gold was a little girl, her grandmother told her stories about the glamorous life she had led in pre-war Berlin and how she dreamed of one day reclaiming the grand building that had housed the family business.

Dina’s grandmother died in 1977, leaving behind no documents, not even an address, to help locate the property or prove its ownership. But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Dina had not forgotten her grandmother’s tales and set out to find the truth.

In 1990, Dina marched into a German government ministry at Krausenstrasse 17/18, just two blocks from Checkpoint Charlie, and declared:

“I’ve come to claim my family’s building.”

And so began her legal struggle — to reclaim the building that had belonged to her family.

The six-story office block had been the headquarters of the H. Wolff fur company, one of the most successful Jewish fashion firms in Germany. Built by Dina’s great-grandfather in 1910, it was foreclosed on by the Victoria Insurance Company in 1937. Ownership was transferred to the Deutsche Reichsbahn, Hitler’s railways, that later transported millions of Jews to death camps.

Today the Victoria is part of ERGO, a leading German insurance company. Few are aware that the Victoria was once chaired by a lawyer with connections to the top of the Nazi party. The Victoria was also part of a consortium that insured SS-owned workshops using slave labor at Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

Dina has delved deep into archives across the world and made shocking discoveries. What she found has repercussions even in today’s Germany.

In a major victory, Dina persuaded the German government to put up a plaque in July 2016 acknowledging in both German and English the history of “The Wolff Building.”

But the story is STILL not over.

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News

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Events

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Media

Recovering a Family’s History

Written by Dina Gold on March 15, 2017. Posted in Media

Sarasota Herald Tribune staff writer, Elizabeth Djinis, came to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum event at Temple Beth Sholom and here’s her report.

Gold spoke as part of an event held by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., moderated by the museum’s director of visiting scholar programs, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, and featuring the museum’s chief of research and reference, Diane Afoumado.

Before the lecture, Afoumado also led private sessions with local survivors and those interested in learning their family’s history, using some of the museum’s research tools. One of those is the International Tracing Service, a paper archive formerly only accessed in Germany that can be found in digitized records at the Holocaust Museum.

The private sessions for those keen to research, as I have done, the fate of family members were of immense interest to the audience. Many were intrigued by what documents they might be able to unearth with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s help. This is a wonderful, free, service but, as I warned people at the event, you have to prepare yourself emotionally for what you might discover.