Gabriele Kohn was born in 1927 in the city of Nyíregyháza, Hungary, the seventh of Joseph and Rivka Kohn's twelve children. The staunchly patriotic family lived outside the Jewish Quarter, but maintained a traditional Jewish lifestyle.
The German army occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944, and approximately one month later Hungarian gendarmes started to transfer the Jews to a ghetto that was established in a bloc of buildings in a large Jewish neighborhood in the city. The Kohns slept on mattresses on the floor of the synagogue, and were moved to a tobacco factory a week later. On 23 May 1944, the family was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. While they were still in the cramped cattle car, Rivka promised her children that after the war they would all meet at 61 Herzl St. in Tel Aviv, where their brother Moshe Avraham had moved when he immigrated to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine) in 1938.
The family was separated upon arrival at Auschwitz: Rivka and the three youngest children were sent to the gas chamber, and Joseph and the boys were assigned to work in a coal mine. Joseph fell ill and died. Four of the sisters—Leah, Malka, Miriam and Gabriele—stayed together in the camp and hid the fact that they were related, for fear of being separated. In October 1944 they were sent to work in an arms factory in Hertine, and from there were forced on a death march via Dachau to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where they were liberated by the Soviet army on 8 May 1945.
After Theresienstadt was liberated, the camp was locked down due to a typhus epidemic. One day, Miriam helped an elderly Dutch man retrieve a siddur from underground. The siddur was inscribed with the name Gabriele Kohn in gold letters, and had been given to the man's son for his Bar Mitzvah before the war. The man's wife and son had been deported to Auschwitz and murdered, and when he was deported to Theresienstadt, he buried the siddur. The sisters noticed that the name on the siddur was identical to Gabriele's, and learned that its owner was the same age as her – 18. To the bereaved father's question as to whether she know how to pray, she replied that she knew the "Shema" prayer. He gave her the siddur, asking her to look after it, and to commemorate his son's name by reciting the Shema every day. One of the sisters wrote a dedication in Hungarian inside the siddur:
Forget the place where you received this siddur, and the suffering you endured here. Theresienstadt, 21 May 1945
The girls' brothers were all murdered during the Holocaust. Gabriele kept the siddur, but at some point it disappeared, and she didn't find it for 35 years. Coming across it by chance, she decided that in light of the promise she had made to the siddur owner's father to commemorate his son's name, the siddur's rightful place was at Yad Vashem, where it would be preserved for posterity.
.jpg "Siddur (prayer book) that was given to Gabriele Kohn after the war")
_2.jpg?itok=gYdTa_Sy "The Siddur (Prayer Book) that Gabriele Kohn Received after Liberation")
