With Help Of Concentration Camp Pendant, Forgotten Holocaust Victim’s Family Reunited

Image by Getty images
One year after her name was recovered from a silver pendant found at a Nazi death camp in Poland, far-flung relatives of a young Holocaust victim named Karolina Cohn gathered in Frankfurt for the first time to honor her memory.
“It’s a heart-warming emotion to meet family who were strangers to us before today,” Barry Eisemann, a first cousin of the dead girl, told the Associated Press. “But it’s a heart-wrenching emotion … to know that Karolina and the entire family perished in the Holocaust.”
Cohn’s name was lost to history after she was deported from Frankfurt at the age of 12 in November of 1941. Archaeologists found a pendant bearing her name last year. Genealogists then found more than two dozen family members, many of whom met for the first time at the memorial ceremony last week.
Four plaques were placed in the street at the site of Karolina and her family’s onetime home.
Clarification: An early version of this blog post referred to Sobibor as a Polish death camp. Sobibor was a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland.
Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected] or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.

