Maxmilian Goldberger was born in March 1897 in Ostrava. He had three brothers and a sister, his father was a city clerk. Max trained as a parquetry worker, commuting to work in Orlová every day. In 1919 he married and worked at the United Timber and Industrial Company in Ostrava, working his way up from a worker to a operations manager. In 1930 he moved to Hodonín, where he was already the director of the parquetry factory. During the mobilization in 1938, he volunteered in Brno to defend his homeland, after the occupation he crossed the border into Poland and in Krakow he was the ninth man in line to join the Czechoslovak exile army. He was unable to get his family out, his wife and daughter were murdered.
Despite his age, he fought in France, survived the evacuation of the Czechoslovak unit to England and became a staff sergeant major of a tank unit. In 1944 he fell ill with a heart attack and lost his sight, so he found work as a worker in a leather factory. After returning to his homeland, he suffered from loneliness: his brothers Ervin, Oskar and Josef died as fighters of Svoboda, the eastern exile army, and his sister Olga was murdered in the Minsk ghetto. No one from his extended family survived either. As an expert, he was assigned to manage a plywood factory in Mojžíř, remarried, but at the end of 1947 his heart failed him again and he was sent to retirement. In 1948, as an invalid, he was assigned to a tobacconist's shop in Ústí nad Labem, where he began to devote himself intensively to work for the Jewish community.
Secretly taken surveillance photo of Maxmilian Goldberger and his wife. Security forces archive.
Why do you think secret police agents photographed Maxmilian Goldberger?