Queens, NY – He survives Nazi Death Camp, Turns 100

Queens, NY – AN AUSTRIAN immigrant who survived a Nazi concentration camp and built a better life in Queens has reached a milestone that most will never see.

Max Goldenberg marked his 100th birthday on Sunday with a celebration the day before surrounded by friends and two generations of progeny.

“I’m lucky to be here, no question about it,” Goldenberg said as he looked back on a life that spanned some of the most tumultuous years of the 20th Century.

Goldenberg arrived in the U.S. in 1939 after being released from Dachau, the infamous work camp in Nazi Germany.

He settled in Brooklyn but found a job at McGuiness’s restaurant in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, which was at the time hosting the World’s Fair.

He went on to create a successful sheet-metal business in Astoria, and raised three boys with his wife, Frieda.

“Everything I am is because of my dad,” said Steven Goldenberg, a criminal defense attorney.

“You can’t buy the time you have with your father. You feel he’s always going to be there even though you know he’s not,” he said.

Max Goldenberg was an only child in a wealthy family in Vienna. He was visiting a friend’s house when Nazi soldiers rounded him up with other young men and shipped them off to Dachau. He recalled the slurs, punches and back-breaking labor.

“So many things go through your head,” Goldenberg said, noting he was still thankful to be alive. He was eventually released, but his father, Leon, wasn’t as fortunate. He was gassed to death in Auschwitz in 1944, he said.

Despite the tragedy he has witnessed during his long life, Goldenberg doesn’t dwell on his hardships, said Carol Haynes, an aid who has taken care of him for the last five years at the assisted-living home on the upper West Side.

“His actions speak louder than words,” Haynes said.

Goldenberg’s mother, Regina, could have suffered the same fate as her husband but an SS colonel helped get her out of Vienna, he said. Soon she was on en route to New York, ready to meet her son.

“We were just happy,” said Goldenberg, whose eyes began to well up as he described the long-awaited reunion. “We just hugged. It was the best.”

Goldenberg’s company, A. Suna and Co., did sheet metal work for the exterior of Shea Stadium and for the World’s Fair in 1964. He sold his half of the business to his partner, Harry Suna, in 1977. The space eventually became Silvercup Studios.

Frieda died in 1996, after more than 50 years of marriage. The time was “way too short,” Goldenberg said.

He now takes it easy, playing poker and watching movies – a lifestyle he admits is much different than the grueling schedule he used to keep as a younger man.

“I used to be very active, but after 100 years you get lazy,” he said.