Four grandparents. All four survived.

What were the odds?

I'm Arik Cohen. All four of my grandparents survived the Holocaust. Their stories are filled with narrow escapes, unexpected help, and extraordinary luck. Without any one of them, I wouldn't be here to tell their stories.

I share their stories as a Legacy Speaker with the Holocaust Center for Humanity.

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Young Arik with Masha, Eva and Emil, seated together at home — Arik with Masha Klein Schneider, Eva Hirsch Kohn and Emil Kohn.
December 1975 · Family photograph.

The question behind the stories

How did all four
make it through?

Again and again, their lives turned on circumstances they could not control: a warning, a separation, a place to hide. The more I learned, the more extraordinary it seemed that all four survived.

Through family testimony, photographs, and historical records, I trace those moments and the lives my grandparents rebuilt afterward.

Meet my grandparents

Four lives. An extraordinary family history.

They had families, work, and lives before the war. Follow their different paths through persecution and survival, and discover how those paths became part of my own story.