Holocaust researchers excavating Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, have unearthed a pendant that may be linked to diarist Anne Frank.
According to NBC News, the pendant seems to have belonged to Karoline Cohn who, like Frank, was a Jewish girl born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1929. Frank owned an identical pendant—with “Mazel Tov” written in Hebrew on one side, together with the girl’s date of birth, and then three Stars of David and the Hebrew initial for “God” on the other.
Cohn died at Sobibor, whereas Frank died in 1945 at a camp in northern Germany, Bergen-Belsen. Having uncovered the second pendant, researchers are seeking out relatives of both Cohn and Frank to discern if there is any relation between the families.
The excavations at Sobibor began in 2007, initiated by the Israel Antiquities Authority and Yad Vashem. While some camps made a weak effort to conceal their murderous operations, Sobibor was clearly a death camp: prisoners were often taken straight from the trains to the gas chambers. After an uprising in October 1943, Nazis destroyed the camp and attempted to eradicate all evidence of the killings. But researchers have located the foundations of the gas chamber, as well as the train platform. Now they are finding tokens connecting us to the humans who lost their lives there.