At the remarkable age of 102, Sonja Ibermann Cowan has no interest in wasting her time. There are adorable great-grandchildren to sing to, lively meals to enjoy with her three beloved daughters, and meaningful celebrations of the high holidays with her Melbourne rabbi, who visits her at home. Five years ago, she decided to spend some of that precious time building a friendship with me, all the way in Berlin, where she was born.
The boredom of the pandemic definitely helped. Stuck at home under much stricter COVID-19 restrictions than we had in Germany—Sonja joked about being “eingesperrt” (locked up)—she and her close-knit family started focusing on the past. Her grandson Benjamin Preiss, a journalist at the Australian newspaper The Age, began an ambitious research project to uncover the mysteries of Sonja’s life and the murders of her mother and sister during the Holocaust.
That’s how I got an incredible message from Benjamin in July 2020. He had read a piece I wrote three years earlier, which happened to mention his great-aunt Lotte and his great-grandmother Taube. Benjamin told me his grandmother Sonja, Lotte’s younger sister, was still alive, thriving even, and wanted to talk. I was stunned.
A few weeks earlier, Benjamin’s mother Sandra had come across that essay of mine. I wrote it just after Donald Trump’s first inauguration, about the historical memory in the German capital on my walk to work. Preserved bullet holes from the Battle of Berlin on Museum Island, tank shell scars on buildings at Humboldt University, and memorials big and small to victims of Nazi terror—I wanted to explore whether, as several postwar German generations have claimed, keeping the darkest chapters of your national history alive right on your doorstep helps protect citizens today from extremism.
The Stolpersteine plaques bring the scale of the Nazi slaughter down to a human level.
The most powerful of these memorials are the Stolpersteine (stumbling stones): small brass plaques set into the pavement in front of the last-known homes of Holocaust victims. Each one has a stark inscription with a name, date of birth, deportation date, and, if known, date and place of death. As a reporter, I’ve written many times about the stumbling stones, the life’s work of artist Gunter Demnig, often called the world’s largest grassroots remembrance project. There are now over 100,000 plaques across 31 European countries, dedicated to victims who, for the most part, have no marked grave. The Stolpersteine bring the unimaginable scale of the Nazi slaughter down to a human level, as passersby literally bow before them to consider one person’s fate. Two lie in front of my building in central Berlin. They are dedicated to Sonja’s mother Taube Ibermann, known as Toni, and Toni’s eldest daughter Lotte. My German husband Hilmar and I have made a point of polishing them for years, a small gesture to honor these strangers who, during World War II, would have been our neighbors. With Benjamin’s message, the stones suddenly came to life.
My first conversation with Sonja happened in September 2020, on a lockdown Zoom call unlike any other. Through Sonja’s eldest daughter Lorraine, who lives with her, we arranged to talk on a Sunday before Sonja’s bedtime in Melbourne and just after breakfast in Berlin. Sandra and Benjamin joined the conversation, both out of an instinct to protect her, they later told me, and in the hope that she might open up to a stranger calling from her old hometown about still-unclear parts of her childhood and her eventual journey to the UK as a teenager.
Sonja appeared on screen with a bright smile and a touch of rose-colored lipstick: self-assured, focused, and looking at least twenty years younger than her age.At 97, her hearing and memory were as sharp as ever, and she had a cheeky, no-nonsense humor that instantly marked her as a true Berliner. As we talked, she chuckled at my attempt to pronounce the German tongue-twister street name Stallschreiberstraße (go ahead, try it), where she went to school for a time. She dryly noted, “I haven’t got much time left. So I live from day to day, especially now, while I’m eingesperrt” – to protect her health. “No dancing!” she joked. Her unique German-Scottish accent when speaking English, with just a hint of an Australian twang, traced her complicated life journey.
During our chats throughout the pandemic and beyond, Sonja and I developed an easy, relaxed connection. She shared her extraordinary story, while I gently asked questions, careful not to push too hard for details. We agreed she would let me know if anything was too painful to discuss. “You ask the right questions,” she told me during our first conversation. “Thank you for being interested in it.” Her children and grandchildren often join us, affectionately calling her Bubbe – Yiddish for granny. They sit in, captivated, listening to her stories of fear, escape, heartbreak, and surprising joy amid all the crushing sorrow.
Sonja was born in Berlin in 1923, one of three daughters of observant Jews from Poland, Leib “Leo” Ibermann and Toni Ibermann, née Rosler. Her parents spoke Yiddish at home, and their German had a thick Eastern European accent, marking them as outsiders.
Before Sonja’s younger sister Ursel was born, Leo, a salesman, died of a heart attack at just 29, leaving pregnant Toni to support the young family as a seamstress. “I didn’t have a very good life as a child,” Sonja said in her matter-of-fact tone.
Wealthier relatives across town helped when they could, letting Sonja and her family use their tub with hot running water instead of the public baths. Once, an uncle gave them a gramophone – a delight for music-loving Sonja – but since it wasn’t compatible with the electricity in their part of town, she had to spin the records herself with a finger to get them to play.
There’s an extraordinary photo of the three young daughters wearing sailor suits – fashionable children’s clothing at the time – sewn by their mother. They’re lined up by height, like organ pipes, as the German saying goes. While middle child Sonja holds Lotte’s hand, her big sister looks into the camera, her dark eyes fixed with a watchful expression.
Adolf Hitler came to power when Sonja was nine; the Nazis’ rise soon had a direct impact on her young life. Within a few years, the public school she loved expelled her and other Jewish children without warning. Her outrage is still clear more than eight decades later, but Sonja, as she often did in life, just got on with it.
She enrolled at a Jewish school on the grounds of the beautiful Rykestraße synagogue in the Prenzlauer Berg district, where she found a new community of children and teachers. Recently, we talked about some physical therapy she had after a hospital stay, and she said it reminded her of the “beugen und strecken” (bending and stretching) she learned in Berlin PE classes all those years ago, chuckling as she demonstrated for us on the webcam.
Toni could rarely pick Sonja up from school, often coming home from work hours after dark, so Lotte, just over a year older than Sonja, had to take on maternal duties. Sonja remembers Lotte waiting for her one day after school with a coconut in hand, so they could share its milk through a straw on the way home. “She hadShe had lovely big eyes, a nice smile, and she always wore earrings, even as a baby,” Sonja said.
But walking home from the synagogue grounds soon felt dangerous because they were visibly Jewish. Bands of Hitler Youth, newly emboldened, roamed the streets bullying both young and old. “When we saw the Nazis marching, we used to hide behind the big doors of buildings,” Sonja said. “We didn’t want to say, ‘Heil Hitler.’”
The Kristallnacht pogrom on 9–10 November 1938 tightened the noose around Germany’s Jews. Hundreds of men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, and Jewish-owned businesses in the neighborhood were ransacked and vandalized. I found archive photos, collected by the Centrum Judaicum foundation, showing familiar storefronts in our area defaced with antisemitic graffiti.
[Image: Ursula, Toni, Lotte and Sonja in 1939, before Ursula was sent to the UK. Photograph: Courtesy of Sonja Cowan]
Painfully aware that Nazi Germany was no longer safe, Toni had already come up with a plan to save her family. By the time of Kristallnacht, she had sent Sonja away to an agricultural training camp in rural Steckelsdorf, founded by the Orthodox Jewish youth organization Bachad (short in Hebrew for the Alliance of Religious Pioneers). A Berlin industrialist donated a hunting lodge and its large nursery in the countryside to the Jewish community, which became the heart of the camp.
Even as a city kid, Sonja took to her farming classes in Steckelsdorf, where she found another group of friends under the wide skies of the Brandenburg region. “I loved it. We were always climbing trees to pick the cherries,” she said. One day on a country road, an SS officer on a motorcycle mistook her for a member of the BDM, the girls’ wing of the Hitler Youth, and offered her a ride. True to form, Sonja briefly thought about the long walk ahead, then hopped on the back and held on tight.
By 1938, the international community was aware of the Nazis’ crackdown on Jews. Jewish organizations in Europe and the US tried to rescue at least the youngest by asking governments to take in child refugees on temporary visas. About 10,000 were brought to the UK by train and boat as part of the Kindertransport program, but they had to leave their parents and other adult relatives behind to an uncertain fate.
Toni’s youngest daughter, Ursel, had lived in an orphanage on nearby Auguststraße for most of her childhood because her mother couldn’t afford to keep her at home, though she visited the family often. In May 1939, the spirited Ursel escaped Germany on a train to Britain. Three months later, Sonja got word in Steckelsdorf that she was on the Jewish community’s “list of the endangered” in Brandenburg, along with three other trainees, and had to pack her things in a hurry.
On 10 August 1939, Sonja followed on the 28th Kindertransport to England. She was 16, the maximum age to qualify. Today, she dismisses any suggestion that starting a new life in an unknown country with a foreign language required bravery. “I am a person who accepts anything and everything,” she told me, squaring her shoulders. “I take everything in my stride.”
[Image: ‘I get upset when I see reports on television about concentration camps, that sort of thing,’ Sonja says. ‘It still hurts.’ Photograph: Charlie Kinross/The Guardian]
Sonja and Toni’s goodbye on a warm, overcast day at Friedrichstraße station was deceptively businesslike: a firm handshake from her mother, with a promise that the family would reunite in Palestine. It was the last time they saw each other.
Letters from 1939 and 1940, which Sonja’s family miraculously recovered decades later, reveal the real pain of their separation and show that Toni’s calmness on the platform was a brave front for her daughter’s sake. In almost every letter to Sonja and Ursel, Toni begged for news about their life in Britain: “PlPlease write me everything in detail.” She wrote to Sonja: “Many warm greetings and kisses from your mother who loves you.”
While the younger girls managed to escape to Britain, their sister Lotte had just aged out of the Kindertransport program and stayed behind with Toni. Around the time Sonja left, they moved into a 19th-century building in the Prenzlauer Berg district, where I, an American who has moved here, now live. When I visited their old apartment, I saw that the original panel doors and wooden floorboards were still there. I imagined Toni and Lotte anxiously moving through the rooms, waiting for the Gestapo to appear outside the large windows facing the street.
By 1941, Toni and Lotte were forced to move to a Judenhaus, a building the Nazis designated for Jews. These places were often overcrowded, as the Nazis wanted to free up housing for the “Aryan” population. This one was on today’s Torstraße. Records show they were deported together to Łódź on October 27, 1941. Łódź had the largest Jewish ghetto in occupied Poland, outside of Warsaw. Sonja only learned decades later, with help from Berlin’s Jewish Museum, that this was where the Nazis killed her mother and sister.
Sonja eventually arrived in north Wales, speaking “not one word of English.” She managed to file an application so she could reunite with Ursel at a school for Jewish children in Scotland, the Whittingehame farm school. They spent about a year there together. Sonja described the journey there as terrifying. “I don’t know how I managed to travel there on my own,” she said. “I had no idea where I was.” The person who was supposed to pick her up at the station was nowhere to be found. Eventually, a man came by and offered to help, saying his sister spoke some German. She got in the car with him. “I wouldn’t do it now,” she said wryly. “Anything could have happened to me.”
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Sonja Ibermann Cowan recounts her train travel to Scotland in 1939 – video
The school soon told her she needed to earn her keep by working as a domestic servant in local homes, a job Sonja hated. She waited until she turned 18, when she could join the British army. “That’s where I learned English, actually,” she said, describing a sudden new feeling of belonging. For the rest of the war, she worked in military storerooms, first in Glasgow, then in Stirling and Basingstoke.
When the war ended, Ursel got married in London. Many years later, she moved to the US; she died in Arizona in 1999.
After her job ended, Sonja returned to Glasgow to live with a Jewish family who called her the “little refugee girl.” One day, a young man named Ralph Cohen, who had also served in the British army, came by to introduce himself after hearing about the charming new arrival. Decades later, Sonja still enjoys remembering the cheeky romance of their first meeting. She answered the door in her dressing gown and told him she was about to wash her hair. He replied with a bold offer: “I’ll do it for you – I’m a hairdresser.” They were married within the year.
Like Toni, Sonja went on to have three daughters. Facing antisemitism in postwar Scotland, the family changed their name to Cowan. Ralph, remembered fondly by his family as something of a dreamer, eventually grew tired of Glasgow’s constantly damp weather and limited job opportunities. In 1962, he suggested moving to the other side of the world: Australia. Sonja found work at the Red Tulip chocolate factory in the Prahran suburb of Melbourne. She and Ralph enjoyed another five decades together, until his death in 2013.
As of 2023, Australia had the highest number of Holocaust survivors per person outside of Israel, with an estimated 2,500 still alive. Despite so many people sharing a similar fate, Sonja told me there was little talk of the Nazis in Melbourne. “I get upset when I see reports on television about concentration camps,” she said.”That sort of thing,” Sonja said. “It still hurts.”
[Image: Sonja and Ralph Cowan on their wedding day, Glasgow, 1946. Photograph: Courtesy of Sonja Cowan]
After the antisemitic attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach in December, Sonja told me it brought back a long-forgotten memory from her childhood in Berlin, nearly a century ago. “Suddenly, I remembered a song from kindergarten,” she said. “I must have been four or five. I was on stage, wanting to sing that song. Can you believe I remembered the words? It’s a miracle.”
With her incredible energy, Sonja looks forward to our talks as a way to remember happier times. She often breaks into old German songs from her childhood, and Hilmar quickly searches his phone for the lyrics so we can sing along. One of her favorites is Meine Oma Fährt im Hühnerstall Motorrad (My Granny Rides Her Motorcycle in the Chicken Coop), a hit for kids in the 1930s. Despite everything Germany took from her, it amazes me how she still embraces the culture she grew up in. Sonja has been back to Berlin twice since the war, sadly long before we met online. The first time was with Ralph when she turned 70, at the invitation of the city government. “I didn’t enjoy that visit,” she told me. “I didn’t feel at home—it just didn’t feel right.” She said the official program included seeing the musical Cabaret, which is about two expats living through the last wild nights of the Weimar Republic as the Nazis rise to power—a choice she found insensitive. But she returned with her youngest daughter, Hilary, just before her 90th birthday, after the Stolpersteine were laid, and this time she planned her own trip. “I visited all the places I remembered,” she said, “including the cemetery where my father is buried,” in the Weißensee district. When I asked if she ever struggled with the guilt that haunts many Holocaust survivors, she paused. “I thought about it, and I say, I’m lucky. I don’t feel guilty—I’m lucky.”
Sonja’s family is deeply devoted to their cheerful matriarch. Benjamin is now working on an extended creative nonfiction project for his master’s degree, focusing on her experiences and how they’ve shaped the family’s identity. Along with hours of interviews with his grandmother, he has studied deportation lists, family letters, photographs, and reports from Nazi officers. He found identity cards that he says show Toni and Lotte were forced to work for the German electronics company Siemens in Berlin before being deported to Łódź.
Here in Berlin, I try to carry forward the best of a rich culture of historical remembrance and its humanist spirit. I keep polishing the Stolpersteine and send Sonja pictures of them catching the light. Lorraine kindly thanks me for “taking care of our girls.” Hilmar sometimes puts up a sticker with a QR code next to the stones, linking to my essays for anyone interested. Last year, he contacted teachers at local schools about our special connection to living memory.
And so it happened that 10th graders from the local John Lennon Gymnasium—the same age Sonja was when she fled on the Kindertransport—got to interview her about her life under the Nazis. Using her voice note answers to their questions, the students wrote and edited the project themselves. It’s now a podcast available in German, French, and English.
As for me, if all goes well, I’ll become a German citizen in the coming months. I don’t take this step lightly, knowing it comes with responsibilities tied to a past that’s always present. With extremism rising in both my birthplace and my adopted home, I believe an honest reckoning with history is essential if the center is to have any chance of holding.One day not long ago, I opened our apartment door and found a new bottle of brass polish on the mat, along with a newspaper clipping about the Stolpersteine. It was a gift from our elderly German landlords. “For Taube and Lotte,” they wrote.
The well-known scholar of German cultural memory, Aleida Assmann, wrote about our unexpected connection with Sonja in her final book with her late husband, Jan Assmann, titled Gemeinsinn, which means community spirit. “Remembrance at your front door can lead to unexpected blossoms, jumping from the brass plaque into the digital world and across the globe… If that isn’t a remembrance miracle!” Assmann argues that in just a decade or two, once all Holocaust survivors are gone, we will need to find new ways to keep their stories alive.
And when we no longer live in our building, I think there’s a good chance that some of those young podcasters will continue to care for the stumbling stones, letting them keep telling their stories.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about the story of the little refugee girl who became a 102yearold Holocaust survivor written in a natural conversational tone
FAQs The 102YearOld Holocaust Survivor Next Door
1 Who is the little refugee girl
She is a woman named Selma van de Perre She was a Jewish child who fled persecution during the Holocaust and against all odds survived Now at 102 she lives a quiet life
2 What do you mean her story began right outside my door
This means the person telling the story lives in a house or apartment that was once the home of this survivor or in a neighborhood where a key event in her life took place The narrator literally discovered the history of their own home
3 How did she survive the Holocaust
She survived by hiding using false identities and moving frequently She was helped by brave strangers and members of the Resistance who hid Jewish families forged documents and provided food and shelter She was never caught or sent to a concentration camp
4 Is this a true story
Yes absolutely Selma van de Perre are real people She wrote a memoir called My Name Is Selma about her experiences Many survivors live quietly in ordinary neighborhoods
5 How did the narrator find out about her
Often it happens by chance a neighbor mentions the history of the house a family heirloom is discovered in the attic or the survivor herself gives a public talk or writes a book Sometimes old photographs or letters are found during a renovation
6 What is the main lesson from her story
The main lesson is that ordinary people can do extraordinary things It teaches us about the power of kindness the importance of remembering history and that even in the darkest times hope and survival are possible
7 Is she still alive today
Yes as of the date of this FAQ she is alive and well at 102 years old She often speaks to schools and community groups about her experiences to ensure the Holocaust is never forgotten
8 What kind of life does she live now
She lives a simple peaceful life She enjoys
