Cohn, Elsbeth

Elsbeth Aris was born in Danzig on January 18, 1888, to Jewish parents. She married the merchant Alfred Cohn in 1911 and ran a large department store with him in Wartenberg/East Prussia. They had 3 children: Ruth Betty was born in 1912, Georg Joachim in 1914 and Georg Gideon in 1915. In 1936, Elsbeth and Alfred Cohn sold the department store because of the increasing repression; they moved to Berlin to Fregestraße 71. The children were able to emigrate to Palestine or England and to the USA. During the November pogroms, Alfred Cohn was arrested for the first time and taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp; he was released on December 17, 1938. Elsbeth and Alfred Cohn had to move out of Fregestraße 71 and into a so-called Judenhaus at Jenaerstraße 5. On the occasion of the special action "The Soviet Paradise" Alfred Cohn was arrested again on May 27, 1942 and taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was shot as one of 250 Berlin Jews on May 28, 1942. Elsbeth Cohn was deported from Berlin to Theresienstadt on June 5, 1942, and from there to Auschwitz on October 9, 1944. The date of her death is unknown. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren from Israel were present at the laying of the Stolpersteine.