For decades since the end of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi tyranny, an image of three Jewish girls fleeing Holocaust became an iconic image, second to perhaps that of teenage diarist Anne Frank.
The image shows three girls at London’s Liverpool Street Station who had arrived there at Kindertransport, the mass evacuation of Jewish children from Nazi Germany in 1939.
The image appeared in publications, museums and exhibitions. But nobody knew who they were or whether the trio survived the systemic persecution of Jewish people during the second world war.
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But it has emerged the three girls survived the holocaust.
The three girls have been identified as Inge, Ruth and Hanna Cohn. While Inge and Ruth were siblings, Cohn was aboard the same train as them with her twin brother Hans from Halle in Germany.
Inge and Ruth’s mother had stayed behind in Breslau, Germany and were murdered at Auschwitz.
How the ‘three little girls’ Holocaust mystery was solved?
According to a report in the BBC, Inge came across the picture in ‘Never Again’, a book by historian Martin Gilbert.
“That was a big surprise,” Inge was quoted as saying by the BBC.
“He just put in the book ‘Three little girls’, so I wrote to him and said we are very much alive. People say I look like Shirley Temple. Why am I smiling?
“Look at Ruth, she was very affected.”
Ruth and the other girl in the picture with doll Hanna died in 2015 and 2018 respectively. From the ‘three little girls’, only Inge survives till the time of filing this report.
In April 2023, Inge met with Hanna’s daughters at a museum in London where the photograph has been display for decades.
Inge is now aged 89 and lives in south London. She waited more than 80 years to learn the name of the girl who shared her doll with her.
She now knows much more about the photograph that has followed her around.
“This photograph has been a long way,” she told the BBC, adding: “It just seems to attract people.”
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