Frank Gorme

Born: Falik Goldstein
Łódź, Poland
June 10, 1925

Died: June 2, 2016

Frank Gorme was one of six children born to his parents in Łódź, Poland, the second-largest Jewish community of the country. After World War II began in September 1939, Gorme was thrown into the Łódź ghetto. He managed to leave the ghetto and went to the nearby town of Łowicz before relocating again to Częstochowa where he worked as a forced laborer on the railroad. One day Nazis took the Gorme and other laborers to a cemetery to be shot. Gorme faked his death and returned to the ghetto in Częstochowa. In the fall of 1942, most of its inhabitants—about 39,000 people—were sent to the Treblinka killing center and murdered. However, about five thousand, including Gorme, were kept as laborers. Gorme worked at the Raków steel mill before being sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944. He became sick with dysentery yet managed to survive multiple other camps before being liberated by American forces at Mauthausen in May 1945.

Gorme recovered from malnutrition, hepatitis and typhus in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Germany before immigrating to the United States in 1949, ultimately settling in Houston. Gorme married his wife, Betty Ruth Waxman, in 1955. He found success in the meat retail and real estate businesses while the couple raised their four children.

In 1990 Gorme discovered that one of his sisters had also survived the Holocaust and was living in Ukraine. A few years later he moved to Israel, then to Poland in 2000. Gorme lived in the city of Lublin until his death in June 2016.

Parents:
Noah Lawrence Goldstein, d. Treblinka
Sara Hannah Goldstein, d. Treblinka

Siblings:
Hadassah, survived
Two sisters, d. in Holocaust
Two brothers, d. in Holocaust