Mimi

Birthdate: 1 Jan 1919

Place: Berlin, Germany

Mimi Kohane and her four sisters Helene, Anni, Regina and Margot lived in Metzer Strasse, Berlin, from 1919 to 1939. Before the First World War her parents Pinchus and Adele had moved to Berlin from Tarnov in Poland. Mimi later remembered that time of her early life in Berlin as one of “love, Jewish tradition, and the inconsolable pain of a lost world”. There was a genuine sense of Jewishness in the air.

Then came the ‘Reichskristallnacht’ and Mimi remembered how Nazi hooligans smashed shop windows and wrecked a local Jewish bakery. About that time Hitler started sending Polish Jews who were living in Germany back to Poland where they had in the meantime been declared stateless. Without either German or Polish papers they were then later the first Jews to be targeted. Mimi’s father decided to return to Poland voluntarily rather than wait to be arrested; Mimi saw him for the last time at the station surrounded by the Gestapo. In that year of 1938 Mimi also lost her brother as he was gunned down by Arabs in Palestine after emigrating there and joining the Haganah.

Others of Mimi’s family were sent back to Tarnov in 1939 where they were forced to live in a ghetto for a few years until finally being sent a death camp and murdered. The older sisters Helene (“Lenschen”) and Anni remained in Berlin until their deportation to Auschwitz in 1943. Anni’s husband had been arrested three days after their wedding in 1938 and was never heard of again.

A third sister, Regina, had been able to escape from Germany in 1937. She found employment as a nanny to a family in New Zealand and was able to get Mimi to join her there two years later.