The Cohen Family, Sonja, her sister Judie and her parents
On a Sunday in June in 1942, the Jewish Council mailed out the first batch of envelopes containing orders to report. Last names, A through D, under the age of forty were first.
The first couple of weeks into the German invasion, nothing noticeably changed. Although they knew of the social and economic hardships in Nazi Germany, Dutch Jews were still convinced that such things could never happen in Holland. But, things started changing slowly. Small groups of national socialists, mostly uneducated and unemployed thugs, started harassing Jews in movie theaters, stores, and restaurants.
Herman Rosenstein went to school in Lübeck, Germany, where one day after his PE class, some friends teased him about being circumcised. Was he Jewish, they’d asked. After school, he’d asked his mother about it.
The place is Amsterdam, Holland. In a Europe that is torn apart by a Nazi regime, Sonja is forced to come to grips with unbelievable losses. Her husband, her mother and father, her younger sister, her way of life, all by the age of twenty two.
