Sonja Ibermann Cowan, aged 102, prioritizes family life, holiday celebrations, and meaningful connections. During the pandemic, stricter restrictions and boredom led her close-knit family to focus on the past. Her grandson Benjamin Preiss pursued research into the murders of Sonja’s mother and sister during the Holocaust. In July 2020, Benjamin contacted someone in Berlin after reading an earlier essay that mentioned his great-aunt Lotte and great-grandmother Taube. The message revealed that Sonja was alive and wanted to talk. The earlier essay examined historical memory in Berlin, including preserved war damage, memorials to Nazi victims, and Stolpersteine plaques, raising questions about whether keeping national history visible helps protect against extremism.
"At the grand, biblical age of 102, Sonja Ibermann Cowan has zero interest in wasting her time. There are delicious great-grandbabies to be serenaded, uproarious meals to share with her three beloved daughters, and meaningful celebrations of the high holidays to mark with her Melbourne rabbi, who makes house calls. Five years ago, she decided to invest some of that precious time in what became a friendship with me, across the world in Berlin, her birthplace."
"The boredom of the pandemic certainly played a part. Cooped up at home under much stricter Covid-19 restrictions than we had in Germany Sonja joked about being eingesperrt (locked up) she and her extended close-knit family started turning their attention to the past. Her grandson Benjamin Preiss, a journalist at the Australian newspaper The Age, embarked on an ambitious research project to uncover the mysteries of Sonja's life and her mother's and sister's murders in the Holocaust."
"It was as a result of this that I got a remarkable message in July 2020 from Benjamin. He had read a piece I'd written three years earlier that happened to mention his great-aunt Lotte and his great-grandmother Taube. Benjamin told me his grandmother Sonja, Lotte's younger sister, was still alive, thriving even, and wanted to talk. I was thunderstruck."
"Preserved bullet holes from the Battle of Berlin on Museum Island; tank shell scars on buildings at Humboldt University; and memorials large and small to victims of the Nazi terror I wanted to explore whether, as several postwar German generations have claimed, keeping the darkest chapters of your national history alive on your doorstep helped inoculate citizens today against extremism. The Stolpersteine plaques bring the scope of the Nazi slaughter down to a human sca"
#holocaust-remembrance #intergenerational-memory #berlin-historical-sites #stolpersteine-plaques #covid-19-pandemic
Read at www.theguardian.com
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