Passing Through: From Ghetto to Ghost is a haunting, deeply human odyssey of Bernie Goldstein—a Holocaust survivor turned chameleon, liar, lover, and ghost. Through shifting identities, shattered hope, and war-torn Europe, he searches for lost love, family, and truth—risking everything to remember, not forget
Copyright Sam Goldstein Production LLC No part of this can be reproduced in any format
Prologue: The Arrival
May 5th, 1949. New York Harbor.
A seagull wheeled over the choppy waters, riding the gusts like a scrap of paper caught in a breeze. It dipped, soared, and skimmed low across the whitecaps where the Hudson and East Rivers met in a churning, oily swirl. Below, gray ships nosed into the docks like tired beasts returning to pasture. The city rose beyond them, stubborn, massive, indifferent.
From the gull’s perch, the cream-colored buildings lining 42nd Street looked uniform and clean, like polished bones. The mirrored windows glared back at the sea.
A squat gray and black passenger ship turned toward the pier on Ellis Island. Five years from now, the Island would close forever, but today it was bustling. The decks were crowded with anxious faces— some pressed to the rails, others clutching suitcases, babies, or letters from family who had come before. A low murmur floated across the water: different tongues, the same hopes. Uniformed officers moved briskly along the dock, ready to direct the stream of arrivals into the processing hall. The echo of footsteps and shouted names inside filled the massive registry room. The promise of America was just ahead. They wore threadbare coats, eyes wide with hope that only comes from losing everything.
Among them, Bernie Goldstein stood near the rail, silent.
His coat flapped in the wind. The lining was thin, but he barely noticed the cold. In his hand was a creased slip of paper with an address scrawled in Hebrew and Latin letters. Jerusalem. He stared at it a moment longer, then pressed it to his lips and slipped it back into the secret pocket sewn near his ribs. Close to the heart.
He stood, joints protesting after the long voyage. The dockworkers below were beginning to shout and gesture. The gangway would drop soon. But he wasn’t quite ready to leave the ship, not yet. Not before he took a breath of this so-called “land of milk and honey.”
He needed to see it for himself. Feel it. Understand whether the postcards had lied.
Behind him, in the dim cabin, Dr. Franz Koenig stirred.
“Where will you go after we dock?” the older man asked in Czech. Bernie didn’t turn. “Haven’t decided for sure.”
Koenig gave a small smile. “Wonderfully... un-specific.” “You know me.”
“Yes,” Koenig said. “Just passing through.” The phrase sat heavily in the air.
Bernie tipped his hat, eyes distant. “See you up there?” “I’ll wait for Anya to wake.”
Anya, the doctor’s teenage daughter, still slept beneath the threadbare wool blankets. Her cheeks were pale, but there was a gentleness to her even now. Bernie nodded and then slipped out into the hall, climbing to the deck.
Above, passengers pressed against the railing like desperate birds on a wire. They pointed and gasped. Some wept. A few knelt to pray.
And there she was. The Statue of Liberty.
Shrouded in fog, green and solemn, one arm raised against the gray sky. Bernie stared. He had imagined this moment, like everyone else, but it didn’t land the way he thought it might. It wasn’t awe or joy. It was... silence like his body was waiting to decide what it felt.
A small boy, maybe six or seven, struggled to squeeze past the crowd. He tried to climb the rail for a better look, but a hand yanked him back.
“Pavel!” hissed the boy’s father in Czech. “You’ll fall! Always with the foolishness” Bernie watched; his face was unreadable.
The boy shrank under his father’s scolding, head down.
As he passed, Bernie reached out and gently pulled him toward the open space beside him. “Here,” he said in Czech. “You should see it.”
The boy looked up, surprised. Bernie helped him stand on a low pipe where he could peek over. The boy’s eyes widened as he took in the statue.
“Impressive, huh?” Bernie asked softly.
The boy nodded, awestruck. His father moved closer, hand on the boy’s shoulder. He glanced at Bernie, grateful but stern.
“You must learn to listen,” he said to his son, now in English.
Bernie flinched slightly, not at the words, but at the sound of them. English. Not Czech. Not Yiddish. Not German. Another language. Another life.
He looked away and squinted toward the horizon. The mist blurred the skyline. Manhattan looked like jagged teeth rising from the water. Somewhere out there were jobs, apartments, newspapers, radios, lives being lived in buildings with heat and hot water.
Somewhere, perhaps, was a new version of Bernie Goldstein. But he couldn’t imagine who that man might be.
As it often did, his mind slipped to the hills of Czechoslovakia.
He saw stone houses spread across a mountain slope. Goats were on the ridge. The clang of milk pails sounded in the air. His father yelled in Yiddish, "Shut the barn door, or the calves will catch cold!" Laughter. Brothers. Sisters. All gone.
A year earlier, Nat had saved him again.
With help from Dr. Koenig and a forged paperwork trail, Bernie secured a place on the ship. A refugee of political unrest, not the Holocaust. That lie had kept him alive before. It would keep him alive here.
On the voyage, young Anya Koenig asked him why he bore no number on his arm. All the others did.
Bernie had stared out over the water, eyes like slate, unreadable.
“I don’t have numbers,” he finally said, “because I was never meant to stay. I was just passing through.” She didn’t ask again.
Now, as the gangway began to lower with a metallic screech, Bernie straightened his shoulders and pulled his coat tighter.
The others bustled toward the gangplank like cattle, herded by urgency and fear. Bernie stayed back, letting the rush pass. He knew how to wait. How to move when no one was watching. That had saved him more times than he could count.
As he finally stepped forward, placing one worn shoe on American soil, he didn’t feel triumph. He felt nothing.
Not yet.
He would lie if he had to. Reinvent himself again. Be Czech. Be Polish. Be anyone but a Jew who had crawled through the belly of the beast and come out still breathing.
He would be helpful. Harmless. Or essential—whatever the moment required. Because he hadn’t come to America to forget.
He had come to remember.
To survive.
To find the pieces still missing—Helena, Nat, the rest. And maybe, someday, to stop passing through.
But not yet.
Chapter 1: The Search Begins
Bernie trudged through the forest, each step a raw refusal to surrender. The trees stood tall around him, skeletal and motionless, their branches like the fingers of the dead reaching skyward. The wind whistled softly through the pines, evoking the sound of whispering ghosts. He kept his head down, the collar of his threadbare coat pulled tight against the cold. He hadn’t eaten in a day, maybe two. The hunger gnawed at him, but he didn’t slow. It was pain he could endure. He couldn’t bear the possibility that Helena might still be alive, somewhere inside the nightmare called Treblinka.
He had no map, no compass, only a name and a memory. Helena. The last time he saw her was Warsaw, months ago, maybe more. Everything since then had blurred. Ghettos. Trains. Disappearances. Rumors and silence. He’d survived by charm, by trade, by sheer audacity. But all the luck in the world couldn’t keep him from this place, this forest, this mission. He was no hero. He was just a man in love. And that meant he had to keep moving.
The truth had come in pieces. A whisper from a Czech smuggler near the river. A woman on a train who wouldn’t make eye contact. A list, folded into a cracked leather boot, traded for bread in Kraków. He hadn't known what he was looking for until he found it, his mother’s name scrawled there, next to his father's, then his two brothers, one with a spelling error. All crossed out. A quiet, final mark.
He didn’t cry. Not then. He sat down on a bench outside the station, numb. It was snowing lightly. The flakes gathered on the paper in his lap, turning the names to ink smudges. No one stopped. No one asked if he was okay. That was the way of things now, everyone had ghosts trailing them. His weren’t special.
Later, he met a priest in a barn who offered him a coat and half a potato. They talked by candlelight. The priest said the camps had become factories, not for labor anymore, but for ash. Bernie didn’t ask what that meant. He already knew.
He’d thought he was prepared. But it broke something in him when it became real—when it had names, faces, and memories. The silence afterward was total. He didn’t speak for days. Not when a farmer’s boy offered him a place in the hayloft. Not when a resistance courier handed him a pistol and a note with Helena’s name and the word "Trawniki" beneath it. He just nodded. That was enough.
He tried to remember the sound of his mother’s voice, the exact shade of green of his sister’s coat, and the way his father used to whistle while cleaning his glasses. But memory betrayed him; except for Helena, it was all soft now, foggy around the edges. Helena remained clear.
She had a scar under her chin from a childhood fall. She hated pigeons. She called him “Benek” when no one was listening. That was what he held onto. That was what got him through the checkpoints, the back roads, and the cold nights with only a stolen blanket and a stolen name.
He didn’t believe in fate. But he believed in her.
The woods thickened ahead. He moved slower now, more cautiously. The camp lay somewhere beyond the ridge, through the brush and mist. He could feel it. Smell it. Death had a taste, he’d learned—like metal on the tongue.
The woods thickened ahead. He moved more slowly now, being more cautious. The camp lay somewhere beyond. Then, he heard movement. At first, he froze, instinctively reaching for the small knife hidden in his coat lining. But when the figure emerged, it wasn’t a soldier. It was a girl, no older than fifteen. Her hair was shaved close to the scalp, and her eyes, hollow and wide, looked more animal than human. She wore a stained shift that barely hung from her bones.
She didn’t run. She stared as if she no longer had the energy for fear. “Are you... alone?” Bernie asked, his voice rough from disuse.
She nodded slowly.
“I’m looking for someone,” he said. “A woman. Helena. She might’ve come through here a few weeks ago. Healthy, blonde, small scar on her—”
“You’re too late,” she said flatly. The words didn’t hit like a slap; they landed like a dull weight settling over Bernie’s ribs. He wanted to argue, to demand more, but her eyes said enough. Whatever flicker of hope he’d been chasing dimmed just a little more. Still, he didn’t move. She turned and disappeared back into the woods, her steps noiseless, as if she were already half ghost. Bernie stood there for a moment longer before slowly sinking to his knees. He closed his eyes, trying to remember Helena’s face. Not how she looked the last time, but from before. Before the ghetto. Before the war. Her laugh in the kitchen, how she rolled her eyes at his jokes, the smell of yeast and honey clinging to her dress. His hands trembled. He buried them in the cold dirt. A gust of wind stirred the trees and brought back something else. Something more profound. A memory from long ago.
A gust of wind stirred the trees and brought back something else, something deeper, a memory from long ago. Home.
Before everything was destroyed, there had been a home. A real one. Not a cramped flat or a city tenement but a working farm outside Milovice. The land stretched wide, patched with green in summer and white and brittle in winter. Cattle grazed in the pastures behind the barn. The house was made of wood and brick, sturdy, with smoke rising from the chimney most mornings and chickens scratching in the dust out front. Bernie had grown up there, one of seven children and the next to youngest. There was always noise, laughter, and arguments. Someone was always shouting for help with the animals or for someone to set the table.
Their father was a cattle merchant, well-known in the nearby towns for his honesty and tough bargaining. He’d come home late, boots muddy, hands smelling of hay and hide, and gather the family around for dinner. His voice carried the low hum of authority, calm and steady even after a long day of haggling over calves and steer. He spoke little, but when he did, everyone listened. Deals were never made hastily, and his reputation for fairness earned him the respect of Gentile and Jew alike.
Their mother ensured everyone had food, even if it meant skipping her plate. She had a quiet, efficient grace, always moving, stirring, slicing, wiping flour from her hands onto her apron. Her patience stitched the household together. Bernie remembered how she kissed his forehead when he scraped his knee and tucked him in with lullabies sung softly in Yiddish. She never sat until the last dish was cleared, often standing at the stove with a dish towel, humming the same lullaby under her breath.
That kitchen was the heart of everything. It was where news was shared, where arguments flared and cooled, where birthdays were celebrated with whatever they could afford sometimes just a song and a bit of sugar on bread. The floor creaked in familiar places, and the stove ticked as it cooled at night. Even now, the smell of bread or onion can pull Bernie back to that table, to the warmth of firewood and family, to the scrape of chairs and the soft rhythm of his mother’s slippers on the stone floor. A world that no longer existed, except inside him. Nat was ten years older than Bernie. He possessed a quiet seriousness that commanded attention when he spoke. Bernie worshipped him. Nat could lift hay bales as if they weighed nothing, calm a panicked cow, or fix a broken gate in the middle of a storm. He also taught Bernie how to read a map, sharpen a knife, and ask questions without showing his hand.
The Germans didn’t invade with blaring horns and fire when they arrived. They came like a fog, settling over everything and gradually making life smaller. There were no explosions, no dramatic takeover— just a quiet, calculated tightening of control. At first, there were restrictions: Jews couldn’t own radios, then bicycles, and then they couldn’t shop in certain stores or walk on certain streets. Star of David signs went up in windows, Jewish businesses were marked, and slowly, suspicion became policy.
By 1940, following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, antisemitic laws were enforced with chilling efficiency. Jewish children were expelled from schools. Synagogues were vandalized. Quotas were introduced. limits on ration cards and restrictions on professions. They were prohibited from owning pets, attending the theater, or sitting on park benches. Then came the curfews, and the midnight knock on the door became a widespread fear.
Finally, the order came: all working-age Jewish men were to report to the town square to register. “Work duty,” they called it. Reassignment. The Germans said it was temporary.
But everyone knew, deep down, that it wasn’t. No one came back from reassignment.
It was the beginning of disappearance, masked in official stamps and polite instructions. The machinery of annihilation didn’t need fire. It needed silence.
But Bernie knew better. He had seen too many men go and never return.
So he ran.
Bernie fled with two of his brothers, running blindly through unfamiliar fields, their hearts pounding and breath coming in short bursts of fear. They didn’t have a plan. just the shared instinct to run. For a while, they stayed together, hiding in ditches and abandoned sheds, surviving on scraps and rainwater.
However, they were eventually caught; only Bernie managed to escape.
He survived because he trusted no one. He didn’t wait. He didn’t say goodbye. One night, sensing danger in the air, he slipped out barefoot through the frost before dawn. The sky stayed dark, the stars faint. He crept through the tall grass and crossed into the woods that bordered their property. He knew those woods like an old friend—having built forts there as a boy, traced deer trails with his fingers, learned which trees could hide a child and which ones bent low in the wind.
He stayed hidden for days, curled under thickets, his heart racing at every snap of a twig. He survived on raw carrots yanked from gardens and cold potatoes pulled from the dirt with shaking hands. He listened, straining for voices, footsteps, gunshots, anything. But mostly, there was only wind and the occasional distant shout. No word of his brothers; no sign of his family.
When he finally dared to creep back, hoping against hope, the farm was gone. Not burned—just emptied. Stripped. The animals were gone. The barn door hung off its hinge like a broken arm. The front gate had been torn from its post. It was too quiet.
Then he saw the neighbor, an old Gentile man who used to trade eggs for milk, someone his family had once trusted. The man stood in the field, as still as a fencepost, watching Bernie. He didn’t wave. He didn’t speak. He raised one hand, slow and deliberate, palm open. A warning. A farewell. A silent plea: Don’t come back.
And Bernie didn’t.
“They took them,” he said quietly. “The whole family. Put them on a train. Resettlement, they said.” Resettlement. Sure.
Bernie didn’t believe that for a second. He knew what those trains meant. By then, everyone knew. Even if they pretended not to.
He never saw his parents again. Or his sisters. Or his brothers.
Only Nat survived. He had left years earlier, in 1929, to work with a cousin as a bricklayer in Israel. Things were still fine then, quiet, stable, hopeful. The family teased him for going so far to lay bricks in the sun, but Nat had always chased opportunity. He wrote home often at first, letters filled with stories of dusty hills, lemon trees, and long days working with his hands. Bernie used to wait by the window for the postman, eager for news, for the crumpled envelopes with Hebrew stamps.
No one imagined what was coming.
By the time the world shifted, slowly at first, then all at once, Nat was too far away to reach. Their father wrote him one final letter after the Nazis marched into Prague. It was short, just a few lines in shaky Yiddish. “Don’t come home,” he wrote. “They’re taking people now. Stay there. Stay alive. That’s all that matters.” Bernie never saw a reply. He wasn't sure if Nat had received it, or if he had chosen to forget the family he couldn’t save.
And now Bernie was here, all those years later, walking toward a place from which no one returned, thinking of Nat and wondering if his brother was safe. Did he still think of home? Of Bernie? Did he remember the hills behind their farm, how their mother hummed while kneading bread, or how Bernie used to chase him with a stick, pretending it was a sword? Or had he, like so many others, buried it all to keep moving?
Bernie tried to envision Nat now, not as he was in memory years earlier, but as a man shaped by time and distance. Would he have gray in his hair? A wife? Children who knew nothing of the war, nothing of the brothers left behind? Maybe he had found peace, or perhaps the guilt of surviving weighed on him like stones sewn into his coat.
Bernie reached into the lining of his coat and touched the folded scrap of paper with Nat’s address in Jerusalem. The ink had faded, but the promise hadn’t. It was the last clear thing he had from before—the handwriting, the slanted letters, the name of a street that might not even exist anymore.
One day, he would find his brother.
If there was still a world left to find him in.
And if Nat could still recognize the boy he left behind.
He dug into his coat and pulled out the old paper again, soft from years of being folded and refolded. It was the address in Jerusalem, with faded ink. It was a promise.
“I’ll find you,” Nat had said. “When this ends.”
Bernie stared at the paper for a moment longer before pressing it to his lips and carefully folding it back into the lining of his coat.
He rose, slowly. His legs were stiff, but they held.
Whatever waited beyond that ridge, gas, fire, soldiers, it wasn’t the end. Not yet. As long as Nat might still be out there and Helena’s name still echoed in his chest, there was something left to search for.
Even in hell, there had to be something worth saving.
He picked up his pace. The trees began to thin. The air grew foul. But Bernie didn’t flinch.
He walked on.
As he moved through the shadows, his mind turned, not to grief, not to Helena’s face or Nat’s promise but to the one thing that had kept him alive this long: the ability to adapt. He knew by now that he'd need more than hope if he wanted to keep breathing. He needed a plan.
He’d always had a talent for invention—not of machines or tools, but of people. Of himself.
Even as a boy, he’d been a shameless liar. Not the cruel kind. Not the kind that got people hurt. Just the kind that got him what he wanted. He could spin stories so real, even he believed them while they lasted.
He remembered once, at age nine, telling the neighbor, a serious, stone-faced widow, that a wolf had come in the night and slaughtered every last one of the family's chickens. He wept when he told it. He was convincing and dramatic. The woman, moved by his sobbing, handed over five of her hens in a burlap sack.
His mother found out and was furious. She marched him back and made him return the items. But Bernie remembered how, for an entire day, he’d felt powerful—like he could bend the world with just a story.
He would need that now.
He didn’t carry weapons. He didn’t have numbers. But he had a gift, the face of a scared young man, the instincts of a fox, and a soul that hadn’t gone cold. He could lie. He could blend. He could be whoever someone needed him to be.
A Polish farmhand. A German sympathizer. A Jewish trader with access to sugar, cigarettes, or morphine. Whatever it took, the more valuable the role, the safer and the closer he could get.
He had already done it in Warsaw. Swapped identities like coats. Built a new name from scratch more than once. Got caught once, too, but talked his way out with a forged letter and a handshake that slipped a bar of soap into the right palm. He wasn’t proud, but pride was a luxury. He had traded that away long ago.
Now, near Treblinka, the stakes were even higher.
If he could pass as valuable and necessary, he might be able to get close—close enough to hear things, see things, trade with guards, and listen for names. Whispers. Anything.
He had already heard of a network of smugglers who sold goods to the SS in exchange for favors, protection, and information. Black marketers operate in the gray zone between horror and survival. Bernie didn’t view them as collaborators. They were rats in a maze, just like everyone else—only smarter, meaner ones.
He could be one of them, just long enough to find out what happened to his family, to Helena, and to all the others taken under the lie of resettlement.
He’d trade anything: soap, bread, buttons, stolen rations. He’d whisper deals in the back rooms of taverns and the corners of train stations. He’d pretend to be less Jewish, more loyal, or invisible. Whatever it took.
Because he’d already learned: in a world like this, truth didn’t matter, only the story you could sell. And he could sell anything.
He kept his ears open, his face calm, and buried his honest thoughts beneath layers of fiction. He smiled when they needed him to smile, nodded when it kept him alive, offered a crate of tobacco in one hand, and hid a question behind his teeth.
He would get close enough to the Nazi pigs to smell the sweat in their uniforms, close enough to make them believe he was one of the useful ones, a black market angel, the kind they’d protect while they weren’t looking.
Then he’d listen. Learn. Wait.
And when the time was right, he would disappear again—vanish like smoke, leaving behind only footprints and questions.
That was the plan.
It wasn’t noble. It wasn’t heroic. But it was survival.
And for Bernie, that was enough—for now.
Because he wasn’t just searching for Helena or his family. He was hunting the truth.
And no uniform, no train, no lie of resettlement would stop him from finding it.
He walked faster now, head low, heart colder. The trees surrendered to open ground, and in the distance, beyond a thin veil of mist, the outline of the camp began to take shape, the buildings, fences, and smoke rising steadily into the sky.
Bernie kept walking.
He would become who they needed.
Until he could become someone they had never seen coming. Survival is his rebellion.
To Be Continued
