Golda Brudolei was born in 1921 in the village of Selets in the Mogilev Province, which was home to a Jewish rural council in the 1920s and 1930s. When Golda was 7 years old, her father Hirsch died. Her widowed mother Taibe continued to work in agriculture and raise her four children. The family was relatively traditional, and in the 1920s the children were tutored by a visiting melamed, a private teacher of religious law. Such educational practices were fairly common in those years.
In 1937, Golda finished 7 classes of Yiddish school, whereupon she continued her education at a boarding school. Golda then moved to Mogilev, where she began to attend a medical technikum. After completing it, she worked as a district feldsher (physician assistant) until the outbreak of the Soviet-German War in June 1941. In its first days, Golda Brudolei was sent to the Mogilev hospital as a Lieutenant of the Medical Service.
In late July 1941, a couple of days before the German occupation of Mogilev, the hospital staff and patients were evacuated from the city.
Golda spent the subsequent war years at a military hospital that followed the frontline troops. She was a surgical nurse, assisting at operations under bombardment, as well as head nurse for blood transfusions. On one occasion, she found herself encircled by the enemy, but was miraculously able to escape.
The entire Brudolei family was involved in the war. Golda's older brother Grigory was killed at its every beginning, in August 1941, in a battle near Gomel. Mikhail Brudolei, her younger brother, served as a pilot throughout the war, and was wounded. Her mother, Taibe Brudolei, stayed in Mogilev. Thanks to her connections with the partisans, she was able to procure a "Russian passport", and her apartment was used as a safe house. However, she was denounced by a tenant living in her house. Taibe Brudolei was murdered, while the woman who had denounced her was identified after the liberation of Mogilev and handed over to the Soviet authorities.
Golda Brudolei met the end of the war in the Far East. In 1946, after her demobilization, she returned to Mogilev. A year later, Golda, who was now married, moved to the Ural region, where she worked as a first aid feldsher until 1970. Golda Chernykh and her family then returned to her native Mogilev, where she became a nurse at a tuberculosis clinic.
