By: Devan Mighton, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Tilbury Times Reporter
As a child, Pamela Goldstein enjoyed reading. She grew up with books and fell in love with narrative—not just the reading of it, but the creation of it as well. She taught herself how to create stories, using her favourite genres to express herself.
Eventually, she jumped into the Chicken Soup book series, writing short stories for them and also editing a few of their editions.
In the mid-2000’s, she founded the Windsor International Writers’ Conference to help writers, much like herself, connect with agents and further their careers. The organization eventually received a nod from Reader’s Digest for their efforts.
In March 2024, Goldstein published her first full-length book—Still The Soul Survives: A Journey of Compassion, Memory and Self-Discovery. A memoir, the book recounts her life as a nurse, meeting her husband, and her interactions with Holocaust survivors starting back in 1973.
“How it got started was that I was taking care of a lot of Holocaust survivors, and they knew I had a lot of published short stories and they asked me to write their stories down,” she recalls. “They wanted their stories to be told, but not in a documentary fashion. They wanted it to be a spy or political thriller—maybe a Harlequin romance story like that.”
During World War II, Germany’s Nazi regime systematically rounded up and murdered 11 million people, including 6 million Jews, from across Europe through a series of extermination camps collectively known as the Holocaust.
Goldstein wrote a story that she says was almost 300,000 words long and shared it with her patients at the Windsor Hospital’s cancer clinic. She says that the stories were greatly appreciated by the patients, many of whom did not have much time left.
“It’s all from them,” states Goldstein. “It’s what they wanted in their stories, to be involved in every one of those books. It took a lot of work, but that’s what I did.”
“The first Holocaust survivor that I met, I was 21 years old,” she explains. “They would teach us a little bit about World War II, but they didn’t really teach us about the Holocaust back when I was a student. This gentleman, who I met back in 1973, was there because of injuries that he sustained while being in Auschwitz.”
Her original story has been divided into three parts. Still The Soul Survives serves as her memoir and is out now. Which will be followed by two works of fiction—Only The Dead Survive (April 2025) and No Guarantee (Fall 2025).
Only The Dead Survive revolves around an Israeli soldier and a Canadian nurse who fall in love. On a plane ride to Israel, their flight is highjacked by terrorists. After landing, Israel is attacked by both Hamas and Hezbollah.
In No Guarantee, a nurse and doctor fall in love in Windsor, only for the protagonist to be stalked by another doctor with murderous intentions.
Goldstein developed a passion through the stories of her patients and educated herself through countless hours of reading and time spent at the Windsor Public Library. She learned of the extermination camps, the experiments, but she also learned how her community, Windsor, also sponsored and brought in almost 100 Holocaust survivors after the war—her patient being one of them.
Over the years, a good number of Holocaust survivors ended up at the cancer clinic. The more she heard, the more she learned about herself.
“I listened to their stories,” reports Goldstein. “One lady had been brutally raped several times (over her time in the camps), while I had been raped once. I didn’t know how to cope with that. Together, we sat and compared notes, and it was like ‘Oh, you can survive this.’ That was the theme. How do you make your life matter after you’ve had something terrible happen to you.”
She was impressed by the survivors. Many of them were humanitarians after the war, involved in notable civil rights marches in the 1960’s and 1970’s, some with Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as major letter-writing campaigns.
One of the biggest lessons she learned through writing these books is how fragile human concepts like democracy can be and how quickly those rights can be stripped away.
“I have to make sure that my life matters and I have to make sure that if I find a situation like the riots in Detroit or the crisis in Somalia, and all of those immigrants coming over, you have to make sure you do as much as you can to fight against tyranny and all the horribleness going on,” states Goldstein.
In her book, she says that one of the hardest things to do in life is to learn how to forgive, even those that have hurt you the most. She recounts meeting a former Nazi in the cancer clinic and, once he found out she was Jewish, he begged her for forgiveness. She said that she found it in her, but it was one of the toughest things she had to do.
“It was the hardest thing I had to do, because he wasn’t going to settle, and he wasn’t going to die with dignity and grace unless he heard me forgive him,” states Goldstein. “It was a really emotional crisis for me.”
Still the Soul Survives: A Journey of Compassion, Memory, and Self-Discovery is available for order on Amazon.ca and at Indigo bookstores.
