I can’t be sure, but a family account of her arrest and murder is evidence that she probably was, says former Observer writer of a deportation of Jews from the German city of Breslau
My grandmother, Ilse Cohn, died on 29 November 1941. No, that’s not quite right. She was murdered – shot by a Nazi execution squad on the edge of a huge burial pit on the outskirts of Kaunas in Lithuania.
Last Sunday, as I opened my copy of the Observer, I found myself staring at the heart-stopping photographs of German Jews in the city of Breslau, now Wrocław in Poland, who had been rounded up to await deportation. Breslau was my grandmother’s home town.