NOAH GOLDBERG AND HIS WOODEN LEG

Evening Star, Issue 20422, 1 March 1930, Page 9

NOAH GOLDBERG AND HIS WOODEN LEG

Many a romance lias been woven round an eccentric rich man who would not trust his savings to a bunk and died without revealing their hiding place; but no mere romance of a missing fortune outdoes the true story which comes from Vienna. One day there arrived in the Austrian capital a i’olish Jew named Noah Goldberg, who took a room in an hotel and deposited £l2O with the manager. Goldberg fell ill, was taken to a hospital, and died. The Polish Cohsul arranged his funeral and had all his luggage taken to the Consulate. 'Then tie wrote to the dead man’s kindred to tell them he had used the £l2O deposited at the hotel to pay expenses and to ask what • lie should do with the luggage. Nobody wanted a trunk ol old clothes. Bub after a while tbo relatives became much interested in it. They knew that Noah Goldberg had a fortune, but no lawyer or banker had any truce of it, and they began to suspect that it was hidden somewhere —behind a loose brick, or buried in a garden, perhaps. But ho might have carried part of it about with him. so they asked the Consul to search the clothes and luggage thoroughly. The Consul did so and found £6U. It was a mere crumb. The relatives now had no further use for the luggage, and it could be sold. So the Consul sold the trunk and all that it contained, and it is here that the tale becomes worthy of a place in flic news of the day. Luckily (most luckily lor the heirs) there is u Consular official named Winder who lias a wooden leg. Goldberg also bad a wooden leg. Wieder said

he would try Goldberg’s wooden leg on and buy it if it proved comfortable. In doing this he touched a hidden spring, and a little cupboard was revealed, tightly packed with bank notes 1 The wooden leg was Goldberg s savings bank, and it held _ £l/,600. This sum is to -o to his relatives simply because there chanced to be a wooden-logged man at the Consulate. If Wieder had had two legs of his own the wooden limb would probably have gone to a hospital or found its way to a hawker’s barrow, and how romantic it would have been if some beggarnmn had worn it! For days he might have stumped about the gutters of Vienna, selling matches by_ day and sleeping under archways by night, till bv chance he touched the spring and found himself rich beyond his dreams.