Manfred Goldberg was born in
Kassel on 21 April 1930, the elder son of
Galician born textile merchant Baruch "Benno" Goldberg (died 1986) and Rosa Seeman (died 1961), both Polish
Orthodox Jews. He attended a Jewish primary school. In December 1941, Goldberg, alongside his mother and little brother, was detained and deported to the
Riga Ghetto. In March 1943, while at the ghetto, he celebrated his
Bar mitzvah. Goldberg, together with his mother, moved to North London in September 1946 and was reunited with his father. In 1958, he joined
Associated Electrical Industries, developing transistors, and later started a central heating installation business. After that point, he spent the remainder of his life educating and lecturing across the country, working most notably with the
Holocaust Educational Trust. In 2024, he became the first participant in Testimony 360, an initiative by the Holocaust Educational Trust in which he answered more than a 1000 questions which were then trained with AI so that he could have virtual conversations with future schoolchildren. The project includes a
virtual reality headset that includes footage of key locations in Goldberg's life which are accompanied by audio commentary and explanation from Goldberg. In July 2017, for the first time since moving to the UK in 1946, Goldberg returned to the Stutthof concentration camp together with fellow survivor and close friend
Zigi Shipper, accompanying
William, Prince of Wales and
Catherine, Princess of Wales (then the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge) on a state visit to Germany and Poland. There, he recited a
Jewish memorial prayer for the victims of the camp. In 2018, he returned to Germany for the installation of
Stolpersteine for his family on Müllergasse Street in Kassel. During the installation, Goldberg recited the prayer
El Malei Rachamim for his late brother Hermann for the first time, acknowledging his death. during Holocaust Memorial Day in 2022 In January 2022, Goldberg was one of
Seven Portraits: Surviving the Holocaust commissioned by
the then Prince Charles to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day. In January 2023,
Frances Segelman created a sculpture of Goldberg's likeness for
Yad Vashem UK. Later that month, Goldberg spoke at a
Holocaust Memorial Day event co-hosted by the
Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the
Israeli embassy in the UK. In January 2025, he met King
Charles III at
Buckingham Palace, shortly before the monarch's visit to
Oświęcim to mark the 80th anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp. In 2020, Goldberg was awarded a
British Empire Medal for his services to Holocaust education. In June 2025, he was awarded an
MBE by Charles III, for his services to Holocaust remembrance and education. Goldberg died in London on 6 November 2025, at the age of 95. ==References==