A second Halberstadt household · oral history
The Cohn family
Lillyan Rosenberg, born Lilly Cohn in Halberstadt in 1928, remembered family, religious life, persecution and rescue in an oral-history interview preserved by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Halberstadt · born 30 January 1928
A childhood remembered in a family and a community
The USHMM biographical record identifies Lilly’s parents as Ernst Cohn and Margarete Marcuse Cohn and her older brother as Werner. Ernst owned a linen factory and store. The family was Orthodox and active in Halberstadt’s Jewish communal life.
The interview is not evidence about the Reichenbach household itself. It belongs here because it preserves the voice of a child from the same city and generation—another family’s account of the religious, commercial and civic world that persecution destroyed.
9–10 November 1938
Persecution entered the household.
USHMM records that Ernst Cohn was arrested during the November pogrom, imprisoned at Buchenwald as prisoner 23954 and released about five weeks later. Lilly’s parents were deported toward Warsaw in April 1942 and were later killed.
The record names what family memory could not repair: parents remained in Germany while both children found separate routes out.
1939 · England
Two children left; their parents did not.
Lilly left on a Kindertransport in July 1939, traveling through Bloomsbury House to refuge in England. Her brother Werner followed in September. Lilly immigrated to the United States in May 1946 and married Gerald Rosenberg in 1948.
The official interview summary also notes her later receipt of family belongings. That detail links rescue to material survival: objects could cross a border even when a household could not remain whole.
USHMM · RG-50.030.0510
Listen to Lillyan Rosenberg’s own testimony.
The interview was conducted by Amy Rubin on 31 August 2006. The museum record reports no restrictions on access or use. This archive links to the institution’s recording and complete transcript rather than detaching the testimony from its catalogue record.
Relationship to this archive
A neighboring history, not a claimed branch
Goldine Marcuse Reichenbach’s family chart names a mother born Johanna Cohn. No evidence presently connects Johanna’s Cohn line to Lilly’s family. The shared surnames are kept as a research question, not presented as kinship.