Families as Memory Keepers – conversation with Tamar Cohn Gazit, granddaughter of Willy Cohn
Tamar learned about her family’s life in the pre-war German city of Breslau from diaries of her grandfather, teacher and historian Willy Cohn. She was thirteen when in 1960 her father Ernst Abraham brought home Willy’s memoir book and the diary notebooks from London and started translating them from German to Hebrew, page by page on a typewriter in their home in the Kibbutz Maoz Haim in Israel.
Tamar watched her father spending evening hours translating over one thousand pages of densely printed manuscripts. It was tremendous work after long working days in the kibbutz, and it was done slowly. She never met her grandfather Willy Cohn who was deported from Breslau and murdered with his family by the Nazis in 1941 in Kaunas, Lithuania. Yet, his legacy was always close – it inspired Tamar to engage in her own research on the Jewish community of Breslau and become an educator.
This joint effort of three generations of Cohns to keep memory alive and recorded was the topic of our conversation with Dr Tamar Cohn Gazit against the backdrop of historical events. The conversation with Tamar was moderated by Aga Jabłońska, co-founder and director of the Urban Memory Foundation and Monika Piechota, researcher of Willy Cohn’s diaries, PhD student at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Wrocław.
Biography
Dr. Tamar Cohn Gazit is the President of the Association of Former Breslauers in Israel. She was the Head of History and Civics Studies in ORT, College and Schools for Advanced Technologies and Science in Tel Aviv in the years 1994-2009.
Before that, she has been teaching History and Civic Studies in high schools since 1972. She was awarded a Yad Vashem scholarship. Dr. Tamar Cohn Gazit was the editor of a publication authored by her grandfather Willy Cohn and translated from German to Hebrew by her father Ernst Abraham Cohn entitled „In the Talons of the Third Reich. Willy Cohn’s diary 1933-1941” (Magnes Press, 2014). Most recently she published her own book in Hebrew „Life in the Nazi Regime. The Jewish Community of Breslau 1933-1941. A Model of Coping with Isolation and Distress” (2022).