Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

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 nathankazis@forward.com or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version