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04-07-2023
BERLIN: The picture of three Jewish girls fleeing Nazi Germany became an iconic image appearing in museums, exhibitions and publications. It was taken at London’s Liverpool Street station, but for more than 80 years the girls’ identities were a mystery. Until now.
Inge doesn’t remember the picture being taken and for decades did not even know of its existence.
The five-year-old had fled her home in Breslau, Germany, now Wroclaw in Poland, with her 10-year-old sister Ruth.
Their mother and younger sister had stayed behind and were murdered at Auschwitz.
It was not until she was a pensioner that Inge even realized her and Ruth, who died in 2015, had been forever immortalized as an icon of the Holocaust and Kindertransport, the mass evacuation of Jewish children from Nazi Germany in 1939.
She came across the picture in Never Again, a book by historian Martin Gilbert.
“That was a big surprise,” said Inge, whose maiden name was Adamecz.
“He just put in the book ‘Three little girls’, so I wrote to him and said we are very much alive. People say I look like Shirley Temple. Why am I smiling?
“Look at Ruth, she was very affected.
“I don’t know who that third girl is with the doll. I’ve never known who she is.”
The girl with the doll was in fact 10-year-old Hanna Cohn, who arrived on the same train as the girls with her twin brother Hans, later called Gerald, from Halle in Germany.
Hans’ trouser leg can be just made out in the original glass plate of the picture.
Like Inge and Ruth, Hanna had no memory of the photo being taken, although she did remember the journey and the doll.
She died in 2018 but spoke of her experiences in an interview with the University of London.
“I remember going through Holland and kind ladies giving us sticky buns and lemonade,” she said.
“We got to Liverpool Street station on this train from Harwich and I’m such a conformist the seats were upholstered, they weren’t wooden seats and I was very worried we might be in the first class by mistake. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
