Zvi Cohen (Part 1): The Jewish Boy Who Played for the SS
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11m
In 1939, after years of anti-Jewish legislation, fewer than 214,000 Jews remained in Nazi Germany. Among them was Horst Cohn, a Jewish boy born in Berlin in 1931 — the child who would later become Zvi Cohen.
As Hitler consolidated power, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship and basic rights. Jewish children were expelled from schools, families were driven from their professions, and violence intensified after Kristallnacht in November 1938.
Horst was beaten by members of the Hitler Youth and forced into isolation. On 7 May 1943, SS soldiers came to deport him. Alone at home, twelve-year-old Horst picked up his harmonica and played for the SS men sent to take him away. For two hours, music transformed a moment of arrest into hesitation. The soldiers allowed him to wait for his parents — a small mercy that may have saved his life.
Soon after, Horst and his family were deported to Theresienstadt.
This is the first chapter in the life of Zvi Cohen — and the beginning of a story in which a harmonica became an unexpected tool of survival.
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