Jeannette Tenenbaum née Cohn, verw. Koffmann

Jeannette Cohn was born on July 23, 1883, and she grew up in Berlin. In 1909 she married Leonid Koffmann, a Ukrainian banker from what was then Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipro). She spent the next 24 years in Ukraine, where her two sons were born. Her husband was shot during the civil war, in 1919, and after that she had to raise the two children alone while working as a teacher. In 1933 she returned with her younger son to Berlin (the older son had lived in Berlin since 1926) and rented a flat on the Holsteinerufer, near the house on Altonaer Str., where she spent her childhood. Her two sons succeeded in emigrating, one to London and the other to New York, but Jeannette was obliged to remain in Berlin, because she was still a German citizen. In late 1938 she participated in a sham marriage to a Mr. Tenenbaum, and in this way she obtained Polish citizenship. Immediately thereafter she moved to Lodz, where she had a sister. However, war broke out the next year, and Jeannette was obliged, along with many of the Jews in Lodz, to relocate to Czestochowa, where she then lived in the ghetto. Circumstances there deteriorated, until in the fall of 1942 nearly all Jews in the ghetto were transported to Treblinka. Jeannette was never heard from again.