ORMOND BEACH — Thin and small of stature with blonde hair and blue eyes, Nazi soldiers never suspected Marthe Cohn was spying for Allied forces during World War II.
Though she was a French-born Jew, she was able to slip behind enemy lines posing as a nurse looking for her fiancé and relay crucial information about Nazi troop movements back to the French army.
Cohn, 98, traveled from California to share her story with the more than 200 people gathered Sunday evening at Chabad Lubavitch of Greater Daytona’s Holocaust observance service.
In her thick French accent, Cohn told how she joined the French army in November 1944 after Paris was liberated by Allied forces.
“They looked at me and decided I had no substance whatsoever,” Cohn said, noting her slight 4-foot-10 frame. But she had attended nursing school before the war and used that as her cover to infiltrate enemy encampments as an Allied spy.
It was not until the mid-‘90s that Cohn’s story became well known, and she was awarded France’s highest military honor.
Cohn was one of seven Holocaust survivors recognized for their enduring spirit Sunday. But such commemorative services have “nothing to do with mourning,” said Claire Soria, 82, a survivor who resides in Palm Coast. “It’s remembrance. There’s a difference,” said Soria.
“I think it’s sort of out of respect for those (6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust) who never got a chance in this world. I feel it’s important to do it for them so that we never forget.”
Soria was born in Brussels, Belgium. She was about 6 when World War II started and couldn’t understand the way she and other Jews were systematically shunned.
They were forbidden from attending school, shopping in stores and venturing outside after dark.
“Just about every other day I would hear about someone I knew getting caught and taken away,” she told The News-Journal. “When is it going to be my turn?” she wondered.
Soria was secreted away with an elderly Christian couple who risked their lives to hide her. Her parents visited when they could, but knew Soria would be safer separated from them.
Her mother, aunt and uncle were hiding together when Nazi secret police found them and put them on a train bound for Auschwitz. Her father was stopped on a street car and suffered the same fate, she said.
None of them ever returned. Soria later learned that her mother and aunt were sent to a crematorium and her father was tortured to death.
Though she lost 50 family members in the Holocaust, Soria counts herself among the lucky ones.
“I saw the Germans who occupied Belgium. I saw bombings and windows shattering, and I remember having to go underground to the shelters — those things I remember,” she said. “But I never had to witness people being shot in front of me.”
She participates in observance services, she said, because she believes those “6 million old souls” who lost their lives during the Holocaust “are up there watching us,” she said. “We’re not just doing it for those who are here, but for those who are not.”
Before Cohn took the stage Sunday, 14-year-old Colleen Coughlin performed a short drama based on the life of renowned diarist Anne Frank. Soria said watching someone so young carry on the message of the Holocaust survivors brightens her view of the future.
“A lot of people say to me that there are not many of us (Holocaust survivors) left, and it’s true,” Soria said. “But as long as we have young people like her willing to speak up and let the world know the atrocities that went on and the hope that it never occurs again, I really have a lot of faith.”