Holocaust victim's family brought together by pendant found beneath death camp floorboards

Record ID: 937309

  • Title: Holocaust victim's family brought together by pendant found beneath death camp floorboards
  • Date: 13th November 2017
  • Summary: JERUSALEM (NOVEMBER 9, 2017) (REUTERS) JOEL ZISENWINE, HEAD OF DEPORTATION DATABASE PROJECT AT YAD VASHEM HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM, POINTING TO WORLD WAR TWO GERMAN DEPORTATION DOCUMENTS FOR JEWS FROM FRANKFURT AM MAIN ZISENWINE'S FINGER ON NAME AND DETAILS FOR KAROLINE COHN WITH ADDRESS "THOMASIUS STREET 10, 03 JULY 1929, FRANKFURT AM MAIN" (SOUNDBITE) (English) HEAD OF
  • Embargoed: 27th November 2017 16:44
  • Keywords: WWII Jewish Sobibor stumbling stone Jerusalem Yad Vashem death camp Holocaust Nazis deportation Anne Frank
  • Location: FRANKFURT & BERLIN, GERMANY / SOBIBOR, POLAND / JERUSALEM
  • City: FRANKFURT & BERLIN, GERMANY / SOBIBOR, POLAND / JERUSALEM
  • Country: Germany
  • Topics: Conflicts/War/Peace
  • Reuters ID: LVA00877B5WSN
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Dozens of relatives from three continents lay a brass plaque in the pavement in Frankfurt on Monday (November 13), in memory of a Jewish schoolgirl who perished in the Holocaust and whose fate was revealed this year when her pendant was discovered beneath floorboards at the Sobibor death camp.
    Karolina Cohn may have known the Holocaust diarist Anne Frank: the two girls were born in Frankfurt just three weeks apart. At age 12 in 1941, Cohn was deported to the Minsk ghetto along with her parents and sister.
    Nothing more was known of her fate until archaeologists excavating the site of Sobibor in Poland found her pendant, inscribed with her date and place of birth and the words "good luck" in Hebrew. It was similar to one that belonged to Frank.
    After the pendant was found, researchers used the database of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem to contact Cohn's family members around the world.
    On Monday 34 of them came together to witness the placing of a brass "Stolperstein" - literally "stumbling stone" - in the pavement outside Cohn's former family home.
    Many had not known of her existence or that they were related to one another, such as Shawn Ruby, a 41-year-old schoolteacher from Houston, Texas, who made the trip to Germany after learning that his grandmother was Cohn's first cousin.
    Ruby had for many years not even known that he had Jewish roots, as his grandmother suppressed her history when she emigrated to New York, converted to Catholicism and married a Marine, he said.
    The "stumbling stone" plaques are part of a project begun by German artist Gunter Demnig to place small memorials across Europe where victims of the Nazis lived or worked, to call attention to the individual victims and the Nazi war crimes.
    More than 60,000 of the brass plaques have been set into pavements across Europe. They are traditionally cleaned on the anniversary of the Kristallnacht that was carried out against Jews across Germany on Nov. 9, 1938.
    In the days leading up to the Nov. 9 anniversary, authorities in Berlin said 16 stumbling stones had been stolen.
    German media, quoting local authorities, said the brass stones were removed "for political, anti-Semitic motives" and that so far, no arrests were made.
    Berlin police put up notices around the Neukoelln district asking for information on the thefts while an organisation in charge of maintaining the stones said they would be replaced as quickly as possible.
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