With Help Of Concentration Camp Pendant, Forgotten Holocaust Victim’s Family Reunited
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.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30