At the grand, biblical age of 102, Sonja Ibermann Cowan has zero interest in wasting her time. There are delicious great-grandbabies to be serenaded, uproarious meals to share with her three beloved daughters, and meaningful celebrations of the high holidays to mark with her Melbourne rabbi, who makes house calls. Five years ago, she decided to invest some of that precious time in what became a friendship with me, across the world in Berlin, her birthplace.
The boredom of the pandemic certainly played a part. Cooped up at home under much stricter Covid-19 restrictions than we had in Germany – Sonja joked about being “eingesperrt” (locked up) – she and her extended close-knit family started turning their attention to the past. Her grandson Benjamin Preiss, a journalist at the Australian newspaper The Age, embarked on an ambitious research project to uncover the mysteries of Sonja’s life and her mother’s and sister’s murders in the Holocaust.
