Rose Godfrey
Rose Godfrey was born in Ostrowiec, Poland, on May 3, 1929. She was the youngest of seven children to Hanna and Natan Singer. Rose had four sisters, Frimmet, Shaindl, Toby and Faiga (also known as Fay), and two brothers, Moishe and Yehuda. The Singers were an observant Jewish family and friendly with their non-Jewish neighbors. Rose was a gifted student and enjoyed a happy childhood until the Nazi invasion of Poland. Her excellent Polish and Polish-looking features saved her more than once during the Holocaust.
The start of World War II brought a halt to Rose’s innocent childhood. The Germans entered Ostrowiec on September 17, 1939, at which point a Judenrat was set up to implement the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies and Jews were forced to work as slave laborers in German factories. In April 1941, a ghetto was established, which housed some 16,000 Jews. Many died of hunger and typhus. The ghetto was liquidated on October 10, 1942, the vast majority of its Jews sent to Treblinka, where they were exterminated. Only around 3,000 able-bodied men and women remained in Ostrowiec. They were placed in a smaller ghetto that was established on October 15th, 1942 and liquidated on March 31, 1943.
As rumors arose that an ausiedlung (resettlement) was about to take place, Rose’s father, recognizing that she was too young to work, asked gentile friends to take her in. At 12 years of age, before she left her home, her mother took her aside and said, “You are the only one who has a chance to survive. Du bist ein Yid (You are a Jew). Remember we have family in Toronto, Canada, and Buenos Aires, Argentina.”
While living with this other family, Rose heard the husband tell his wife that the Germans were rounding up Jews and they should take her to the collection location. She tearfully told the couple that she wanted them to take her back to the place where they had picked her up, that she wanted to go back home. When the man of the house demurred and asked “What if I don’t take you?,” she replied that if the Germans caught her, she would tell them he took her from the ghetto and was helping Jews. But getting back into the ghetto was not easy. Rose had to scale a fence and sneak back through a cemetery. She found her sister Fay and her brothers Moishe and Yehudah. During the day, Rose hid in the ghetto while the others went to work.
This didn’t last long, however, because the Jews were indeed soon deported, most sent to Treblinka, where they were exterminated. When they were being rounded up by the Nazis, a man said to her, “They are taking us to a death camp. You are young. Run for your life. You have the looks. You will survive.” As the group marched to the train station, Rose saw a vendor’s booth and made a dash for it, hiding underneath it.
She had no idea how long she was there before she heard some people speaking Yiddish, telling her brother Moishe that they saw his little sister being taken away with the others. When she heard this, she ran out, saying, ‘Moishe, Moishe, Ich bin du! (I am here)” – and so it was that her name in the ghetto became Ich bin du.
Not long after that, Rose, along with several others from her town, took to hiding and living in the forest. Through the kindness of Gentile Poles that her brother Moishe had befriended while serving in the Polish army, Rose – under the assumed identity of a Polish Catholic girl – was taken to Lvov (now Lviv, in Ukraine) to work as a nanny for the Bluss family, taking care of a two-year old girl named Alusia. While Rose described Alusia’s mother as being very nice, she recalled the father as a Jew Hater. It was not easy to live there. The only friend she could confide in was their dog, Zubka, to whom she would whisper in Yiddish at night and with whom she dreamt of escaping.
In June 1944, when she was just 15 years old, Rose was liberated, but she had to wait until January 1945, when Ostrowiec was taken by the Allied forces, to return home. One afternoon, she went to local officials seeking permission to travel back home by train. The Russian soldier she dealt with said he thought she was a spy and got a second officer to screen her further. This second Russian officer looked at her and said, “Did you say you were Jewish?” Crying, she insisted that, yes, she was Jewish, to which he responded, “If so, tell me what did you eat on Pesach and Yom Kippur?” When she answered correctly, the officer started to cry. They spoke for 10 more minutes and then he gave her a special ticket for the train and said, “Geh gesint mine kind” (Go in health my child).”
And so Rose began her journey home, heading out into the unknown, as she put it, “Afraid to find out who was alive and who wasn’t.” The words “didn’t survive” were all too common. Back in Ostrowiec, Rose found her sister Fay and her brother Moishe. Her brother Yehudah was already on his way to Palestine. From a family of nine, only four had survived. When Rose learned of a Zionist organization that was trying to get young people out of Poland and illegally smuggle them into Palestine, she was quick to join. She and her sister Fay joined the Y’chud kibbutz in the region’s capital city of Kielce. In her four months there, she learned Hebrew. Until the end of her life, she could still recite entire poems in Hebrew by Chaim Bialik and others. Once again, Rose’s “Polish looks'' were an asset, as she became the kibbutz courier, going to Lvov and Krakow to bring back supplies and information.
Then, in the fall of 1945, the head of the kibbutz told the kibbutzniks that they would be leaving Poland – journeying to Graz, Austria, on to Budapest, Hungary, and into Italy and points beyond. Traveling as Greek Jews, they maneuvered on the tops of trains, between train cars and by foot over the Alps. The journey was, in Rose’s retelling, a nightmare. Their final destination was Bari in Southern Italy, on the Adriatic Sea, from where they hoped to sail to Haifa. But while waiting to depart, an aunt, Sarah Singer, who had survived Auschwitz with her three sons, Harry, David and Paul, tracked Rose and Fay down. She sent her youngest son, Harry, to Bari to find them and, together, they went to Munich, Germany, crossing the Alps a second time.
In Munich, Rose registered with the Jewish Agency and was accepted to school, where she continued an education that had hardly begun. During this time, Rose and Fay also heard from a cousin in Toronto named Moshe Singer, who finally helped guide them to a better future. On February 25, they headed north by train to the German seaport city of Bremenhaven, where they would sail to Canada. When Rose and Fay opened the door to their assigned train compartment, they found another Polish war refugee already sitting there, named Joseph Gastfreund. It was a fateful encounter as Joseph would later become Rose’s partner in life.
On March 8, 1948, their Canadian Pacific steamship, Beaverbrae, arrived in Halifax. Jewish women greeted and fed them, before helping them on to trains for Toronto, where, Rose recalled, “The whole Singer family waited for us.” In Canada, with the incredible love and support of her extended family, Rose began a new chapter of her life. Taken in by these relatives, whose names were new to her and who spoke a different language, Rose was slowly able to rebuild a sense of hope for the future. She would never forget the help and kindness of friends and family – the people she referred to as lantzmen and mispucha.
On a Sunday, just two weeks after Rose arrived in Toronto, there was a knock at the door. There stood Joseph Gastfreund. He had noticed her when she entered his train car in Bremenhaven and had taken down the address from her suitcase! Joseph had first gone to London, Ontario, to live with an aunt who sponsored his entry into Canada, but decided that the city was too quiet for him and made his way to Toronto. On Yom Kippur in 1949, Rose and Joseph got engaged and started a wonderful new life together in Canada. Their families arranged a wedding on June 4, 1950 at the Ostrovtzer Society, established to support emigres from Ostrowiec in Toronto. The help they both received from families was never taken for granted or forgotten, and the couple subsequently offered the same warm welcome and support to those who came to Canada after them.
In June 1951, these two orphans of the Holocaust had a daughter, Sima. Norman and Myer followed in 1952 and 1956. While family came first for the Godfreys (the name was changed from Gastfreund in 1953), maintaining and celebrating their Jewish heritage ranked a close second. Rose and Joseph sent their three children to Associated Hebrew Schools of Toronto and, later in life, created a fund to help other children attend the Jewish day school. In 1957, they also helped establish Beth El Synagogue, originally in the garage of an apartment building Joe built on Lawrence Avenue, which merged with Temple Emanu-El in 1969.
In 1979, Rose and Joe started a new journey as grandparents. They were overjoyed to see their family grow in the years ahead as they welcomed David, Laura, Benjamin, Lulu, Deena, Shauna and Sam, and they developed special bonds with all of their grandchildren. On May 19, 1998, after nearly 50 years together, Rose’s beloved husband, Joe, passed away. They were an inseparable couple and the loss was very painful for Rose but, strong as ever, she persevered, buying a new home, hosting dinners for family and friends and regularly having her grandchildren over. Rose also maintained close ties with Temple Emanu-el, participating in morning minyan almost daily and regularly attending Shabbat services, in addition to taking part in lectures and special events at the synagogue.
In her later years, Rose enjoyed the wonder of becoming a great-grandparent to Ayden, Joseph, Rory, Jack (Heschel 2030) and Lyla (Heschel 2032). In addition, throughout her life, Rose remained bonded to her sister, Fay, and brothers, Moishe and Yehudah. In fact, Rose and her sister passed away within hours of each other on the same day, September 28, 2022. Despite the challenges she faced, Rose always lived life forward, sustained by her faith, family and friendships. As she wrote in her living will in 2015, she and Joe cherished life, a legacy that she passed on to her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
