RESEARCHERS TRACE CHARM FROM DEATH CAMP TO YOUNG VICTIM
A pendant discovered by archaeologists at Sobibor in Poland is offering evidence of the crimes against humanity the Nazis had tried to erase
Some time in September 1943, Karoline Cohn undressed and waited for her hair to be shaved at a hut at Sobibor, the Nazi extermination camp, in eastern Poland. Then, as Karoline, 14, walked the final steps to the gas chambers, most likely unaware that she was about to be killed, she dropped a pendant engraved with the words “good luck” in Hebrew through the wooden floorboards.
That, at least, is a leading theory to explain the pendant, which was discovered more than 70 years later by archaeologists at the site of the extermination camp, one of the most brutal in Hitler’s killing apparatus. Tantalisingly, the pendant — and Karoline — may also have a link to Anne Frank, the young diarist who has become a powerful symbol of the Holocaust.
“There, along the path to the gas chambers of Sobibor, the pendant belonging to 14-yearold Karoline Cohn was taken, dropped and remained buried in the ground for over 70 years,” said Joel Zisenwine, director of the Deportations Database Project at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, which announced the discovery last weekend.
Ten years ago, archaeologists began excavating the Sobibor death camp, where an estimated 250,000 Jews were killed between April 1942 and October 1943. Leading the excavation team was Yoram Haimi, 55, who has overseen excavations across Israel and who lost two uncles at Sobibor.
Mr Haimi said that during excavations he and his team helped uncover the remains of the camp, which the Nazis tried to destroy and conceal after a successful 1943 uprising by Jewish prisoners. (The revolt, during which 365 prisoners escaped, inspired the French director Claude Lanzmann’s celebrated documentary Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4pm.)
In 2014, the team unearthed the gas chambers, whose foundations the Nazis had covered with asphalt to make the site look like a road. Over a decade, the team has found thousands of personal items belonging to Jewish prisoners, including wedding bands, women’s watches, hairpins and children’s pendants.
Two months ago, Mr Haimi said, the archaeologists came upon a small and distinctivelooking triangular pendant engraved with the words “Mazel tov” — the traditional Jewish offer of congratulations, which means “good luck”. Also engraved on the pendant was a birthday — July 3, 1929, above the word Frankfurt — and, on the reverse side, the Hebrew letter “hay”, which is used to signify the name of God, with three triangular stars of David surrounding it.
After scouring tens of thousands of names in a Yad Vashem online deportation database and searching the list of Jews who had been deported from Frankfurt, Germany, to ghettos or extermination camps, Mr Haimi said that only one name and city matched the birthday: Karoline, who was born in Frankfurt on July 3, 1929.
When t he archaeologists researched pendants of that era, he said, they were struck by something else: the pendant found at Sobibor was nearly identical to one that had belonged to Frank, who was also born in Frankfurt. That pendant was exhibited in the 1980s, Mr Haimi said, and had since been kept by a relative of Frank’s in a safe in Basel, Switzerland.
Objects with links to Frank have gained in value in recent years. In November, an autographed poem written by her in a “friendship book” when she lived in Amsterdam fetched about US$148,000 at an auction in the Dutch city of Haarlem, a price that reflected the hold she continues to exert on the global imagination.
Mr Haimi said the charm found in Sobibor differed in one respect from the one belonging to Frank: the date on the pendants was different by a matter of three weeks.
Mr Haimi said he had determined from the database that Karoline was deported to the Minsk ghetto, in Belarus, from Frankfurt on Nov 11, 1941. But he said it was not clear if she had survived the harsh conditions of the ghetto or had been deported to Sobibor in September 1943, when the ghetto was shut down by the Nazis and 2,000 Jewish prisoners interned there were deported to their deaths elsewhere.
The discovery offered clues but also raised several questions: Was Karoline a close friend or relative of Frank’s? Was she the one who dropped the pendant through the floorboards? Or was it a relative, perhaps her mother, who had clung to it after Karoline was killed? In hope of finding the answer, the memorial has appealed to family members of the girls to come forward.
Mr Haimi said that an 88-year-old Israeli Holocaust survivor, who was born in Frankfurt, recently came forward, saying that she, too, owned a pendant resembling the one linked to Karoline and had kept it for eight decades. He said he hoped she could help solve the mystery.
Havi Dreifuss, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University and senior researcher at Yad Vashem, said finding objects like the pendant had great historical value as they offered powerful evidence of the crimes the Nazis had tried to erase.
“The moving story of Karoline Cohn is important, as every small story we discover like Karoline’s is a story of the camp and its history,” Mr Haimi said. “Everyone had forgotten this girl, but now no one will forget.”