Rachel Cahn – a teacher at Jawne School

Today Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) on the sidewalk commemorate some of those who lived in the Marsplatz ‘ghetto house’. Among them is Rachel Cahn (neé Falk, b. 1890 in Śrem in the Polish province of Poznań), a secondary school teacher married to Dr. Meier Cahn, who was also a teacher.

Meier and Rachel Cahn moved from Leipzig to Cologne in 1921, when he was appointed head of Jawne, Cologne’s Reformed Judaism secondary school. After the death of her husband in the following year, Rachel Cahn continued to teach at the school until it was closed in 1940.

She helped her daughters Jette and Miriam to emigrate early on to the Netherlands, but she herself stayed in Cologne. She was deported on October 22, 1941 in the first transport from Cologne to the Łódź ghetto, from where she sent a final message to a relative. The following year she was taken to the death camp at Kulmhof (today Chełmno in Poland) and killed there. Her daughters met a similar fate: neither of them survived the Shoah.