Holocaust survivor Frank Cohn visited Heritage High School to share his personal experiences with students, according to a Mar. 10 announcement. Cohn, who turned 100 in August 2025, recounted his childhood in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), and the events that led his family to flee the country during the rise of Nazism.
Cohn described witnessing a parade where Adolf Hitler greeted the crowd, recalling the fear he felt as a Jewish child forbidden from saluting. He also spoke about his family’s live-in maid, whom he considered a second mother and who was excited to see Hitler at the event. Cohn said he and his mother escaped Germany in 1938 with only one suitcase each and ten Deutschmarks after his father had already left for the United States. They arrived in New York on October 30, just days before Kristallnacht made it much harder for Jews to leave Germany.
After arriving in America, Franz became Frank—a change he welcomed. He learned English and attended school before being drafted into the U.S. Army at age 18. Cohn landed on Omaha Beach months after D-Day and later served in Belgium and France. When military officials discovered he spoke German, he was trained in military intelligence and worked on assessing captured Nazi officials, securing sensitive sites, and overseeing shipments of Nazi documents for war-crimes prosecutions. During this time, he searched for relatives left behind in Europe and eventually learned that eleven members of his extended family were murdered during the Holocaust.
Teachers at Heritage High School said Cohn’s visit provided an extraordinary opportunity for students to engage directly with history through lived experience. World History teacher Holly Horton said: “The laws that we analyze in class that were changed by Hitler affected Frank and his family. Thanks to Mr. Cohn’s visit and his testimony, the students can reflect on this experience as we discuss these laws.”
English teacher Nicole Korsen said she hoped her students would recognize “the power of the personal story.” She added: “Hearing Frank talk about his younger years could not have aligned better with some of the issues we discuss…We will discuss the many stories that Frank shared…Reading about someone’s experience can be very impactful, but hearing it firsthand is something else entirely.”
Cohn’s visit offered students a rare chance to connect classroom lessons with real-world testimony from someone who lived through one of history’s darkest periods.
