Sara Cohen: Nine Months of Life, a Name the World Must Remember
She was born on May 13, 1943, weighing 6 pounds 4 ounces. Her father never met her. Nine months later, the Nazis murdered her. Her name was Sara Cohen, and she deserves to be remembered—not as a statistic, but as a child who lived, was loved, and was taken.
There is a photograph of Sara taken when she was just one week old. She is wrapped in a blanket, her face calm and unaware. She looks like any newborn—small, perfect, full of possibility. Nothing in that image hints at the fate that awaited her.
Sara was born in Groningen, a city in the northern Netherlands, during the Nazi occupation. Her mother, Carolina Bachrach Cohen, gave birth alone. Sara’s father, Joseph Cohen, had been deported to a concentration camp one month earlier. He would never see his daughter, never hear her cry, never hold her in his arms.
Carolina was allowed to remain at home only because she was pregnant. Under Nazi policy, Jewish women could be temporarily spared deportation until after childbirth. This delay was not mercy—it was part of a system designed to destroy entire families.
Sara was born healthy. Carolina brought her home to their apartment on J.C. Kapteynlaan 7b, where Sara’s older siblings waited: Louis, age three, and Malka, age two. Carolina was now alone with three children under four years old, living under occupation, fully aware that their time was limited.
For nine months, she cared for them. She fed Sara, held her, watched her grow. Perhaps Sara learned to smile. Perhaps her siblings tried to make her laugh. These ordinary moments were acts of love carried out under extraordinary fear. History did not record those details—but their absence does not mean they did not exist.
On February 8, 1944, the order arrived.
Carolina and her three children were deported to Westerbork, a transit camp in the northeastern Netherlands. Westerbork was not a place of execution; it was a place of waiting. Everyone there understood what the trains meant. They knew that families were being sent to camps where survival—especially for children—was almost impossible.
Carolina held Sara for three more days.
On February 11, 1944, they were placed on a train bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon arrival, families were separated by guards. Decisions were made quickly and without explanation. Mothers with young children were not selected for labor.
Carolina and her children were killed shortly after arrival.
Sara was nine months old.
She never learned to walk. Never spoke her first word. Never celebrated a birthday. She never had the chance to grow, to dream, or to choose a life of her own. She was murdered for one reason only: she was born Jewish.
This is what genocide is—not only vast numbers, but individual lives erased one by one.
Sara Cohen was one of approximately 1.5 million Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust. Most left no photographs, no records, no surviving relatives to remember them.
Sara did.
The Netherlands has created Joodsmonument.nl, a digital memorial that documents every Dutch Jew murdered in the Holocaust—over 104,000 individuals. Sara has her own page. Her name. Her photograph. Her birth date. Her address. Proof that she existed.
That is what the Nazis tried to destroy—not only lives, but memory itself.
The fact that we can still say her name—that we know when she was born, how much she weighed, who her parents were—is an act of defiance against that erasure. Remembering her is a way of restoring what was stolen.
Sara Cohen’s life mattered.
Her nine months mattered.
The life she never had mattered.
On May 13, 1943, a baby girl was born in Groningen. Her parents named her Sara. Her siblings loved her. Her mother protected her as long as she could.
Nine months later, she was murdered.
Say her name.
Remember her.
Tell her story.
Because when we remember the victims as people—not numbers—we protect the truth of history and honor those who were denied the chance to live.
