Thanks to the research on a Jewish girl’s pendant recently found at the German death camp in Sobibór, East Poland, it was possible to establish the name of the owner, Karoline Cohn, and her potential fate.

The recently found pendant was the first such find at the archaeologically investigated Sobibór concentration camp, that was made of silver. The researchers were able to identify its possible owner, being Karoline Cohn, who born in Frankfurt am Main on July 3, 1929. According to the archive documents on November 11, 1941, she was deported to the Minsk ghetto. What happened to her next is unclear, but her necklace was brought to Sobibór in September 1943, when the Minsk ghetto was liquidated. It is possible that the necklace was brought either by her or someone else when the 2000 residents of the ghetto were moved to Sobibór.

The item was found during an international archaeological investigation of the concentration camp in Sobibor. One side of the pendant was engraved with the words “mazel tov”in Hebrew, the date July 3, 1929, and the name of the city Frankfurt am Main in German. The other side bore the Hebrew letter “heh”, used to symbolize God’s name, and three Stars of David. The owner, Karoline Cohn, was identified through a list of Jews sent from Frankfurt to Minsk on November 11, 1941. Now, Yad Vashem and the Israel’s Antiquities Authority are seeking the public’s help in locating Karoline Cohn’s relatives, or anyone who knows Sophie Kolman, the relative who filled out Cohn’s page of testimony in 1978.

(after Haaretz, Yoram Haimi, Israel’s Antiquities Authority, Dziennik Wschodni & The Times of Israel)