With Help Of Concentration Camp Pendant, Forgotten Holocaust Victim’s Family Reunited
Image by Getty images
By Josh Nathan-Kazis November 13, 2017
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.
Did you know that only 2% of Forward readers donate to support our nonprofit newsroom? That 2% make it possible for millions to read the Forward without a paywall or subscription — removing any barriers to the full and fair Jewish story.
But while the Forward is free to read, it isn’t free to produce. Big stories — like deep dives into the antisemitism data, political scoops or reporting trips to college campuses — take months of research and fact-checking. All while we keep you informed of what you need to know each day.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Forward Publisher & CEO
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
