By the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre
Recently, the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre received a large collection of letters, documents and ephemera related to the Engel/Cohn families.
The families were German Jewish who immigrated to South Africa in the late 1930s from Breslau present day Wroclaw, Poland to Cape Town. Heinz Engel was a factory owner who was forced to sell his factory because of the Nazi’s policy of ‘aryanisation.’ Heinz immigrated to South Africa in 1936 and was eventually followed by his fiancé, Eva and her parents Paul and Gertrud Cohn. Heinz was unable to secure passage for his parents, Arthur and Hermine Engel and brother, Rudi, who perished during the Holocaust. Little is known about their fate.
Once in Cape Town Heinz found it difficult to obtain work in his field. He even tried to start his own import/export business using his contacts in Germany. However, when the war broke out his operation could not continue. After war he opened a garage in Gardens, Cape Town. He and Eva later had three children, Elizabeth, Dennis and Colin.
Coming up in 2021
We are excited to announce that in 2021 the SAHGF Archive in collaboration with UCT Special Collections will be launching a new interactive digital showcase website, Ibali. Once the site is live visitors will be able to learn more about the families and individuals as well as interact with select artefacts and documents from our collections.
Notification of Jewish Property tax, Breslau, Germany 
German Passport of Dr Paul Cohn stamped with the infamous red “J” which identified him as Jewish.
Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre: https://ctholocaust.co.za/, admin@holocaust.org.za
• Published in the print edition of the March/April Pesach 2021 issue. Download the March/April 2021 issue PDF here.
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