holocaust

In 2019, I visited my ancestral home in a small town in northwestern Germany named Prussian Oldendorf. Through genealogical research, I had learned that my Jewish ancestors—I am 100% Ashkenazi Jew genetically, as well as a proud Jew by upbringing and choice—had lived there for centuries, until my great-great-grandmother, Rosalie Cahen, a single mother with six children, fled persecution by the German authorities and immigrated to America in 1859.

I had read that there was a Jewish cemetery just outside of town that had been made intentionally hard to find because neo-Nazis had desecrated it in the 1980s. I found the cemetery and saw that many of the gravestones were my direct ancestors with the last name of Cahen, my mother’s maiden name. I also found the gravesite for Philipp Cahen, Rosalie’s husband and my great-great-grandfather.