Holocaust escape story leads to global family reunion

As a little girl born in Offenburg Germany, Renata Haberer, who later became known as Renee Krauss of Chicago, miraculously escaped the Holocaust with her sister as a result of their father’s ingenuity. Decades later, she shared her story at a Passover seder, ultimately sparking a cycle of events that connected family members from as far afield as South Africa. 

“We were having a seder at my house, and were getting to the part about the exodus of the Jews from Egypt,” Susan Stein Koehler recalls. “Renee started talking about how as a little girl, she escaped from France across the border to Switzerland, seeking her own freedom.” Her father, Gustav, had joined the French Resistance and facilitated his daughters’ daring escape. 

As Krauss and Stein Koehler’s husband shared common relatives, Krauss became part of his family when she moved to Chicago, which was how she landed up at the Passover gathering. “My mother [Helen Stein Behr] who always wanted to be a writer, was fascinated by this story and asked Renee if she could share it,” Stein Koehler recalls. 

And so, Stein Behr completed a series of interviews with Krauss and did intensive research on the Holocaust and life in Germany and France before and during the war. Based on this, she wrote a nonfiction book detailing Krauss’s survival story aimed at introducing the Holocaust to younger readers in an age-appropriate way. She included specific details of Krauss’s life that ultimately uncovered new family connections. Yet, initially, Stein Behr battled to get the book published. 

Years later, when Krauss was on her death bed, Stein Koehler promised to ensure that her story was told. And so, together with her mother, she edited the book to make it more relevant to contemporary readers and ultimately self-published Renata, A Child of the Holocaust in the US in 2015. 

The book reached New Jersey resident Sandra Lanman, who has a background in journalism and public relations and has been researching her family history since the 1990s. Her interest in such research solidified when she found the biological family of her mother, who had been adopted in Germany in 1928. “Both my parents were Holocaust survivors from Germany,” she says. “Almost all their family members were killed, but I knew my father’s cousin, Martha Levi, who had moved to Durban, South Africa after escaping Nazi Germany.” 

In 2021, while reading a narrative about Levi, Lanman learned that her sister, Ruth Haberer’s, family had survived the Holocaust and had emigrated to the US. “My goal has always been to find living family,” Lanman says. “I had never heard the name Haberer before, so I set out to find them.” Through her research, she came across Renata, A Child of the Holocaust, and ordered the book. “I was amazed to see photos of Renee’s Aunt Martha in the book, just like the ones I had in my own family albums.” 

And so, Lanman reached out to Stein Koehler. The two formed a strong bond and recently produced a 10th anniversary edition of the book together, in which Lanman details the connections it helped facilitate. 

She also tells the story of asking Stein Koehler if any of Krauss’s family photos had survived. “To my surprise and delight, she had a box of photos, acquired after Renee’s death,” Lanman says. “Amazingly, she found a small headshot of my late father, Ludwig Hahn. On the back, he had written in German, ‘I’m waiting at the pier.’ Apparently, my dad was the first to meet the Haberers when they arrived in New York Harbour in 1947, and had sent the photo so they would recognise him.” 

Lanman was thrilled at the discovery. “It’s such a touching and precious piece of history for me, because I never knew this,” she told the SA Jewish Report. “I didn’t know how close my father was to his family.” Like many survivors, her father didn’t like to talk about the Holocaust. She however knew that he had left Germany for England in 1939 on the Kindertransport and came to America in 1941 at the age of 17. Lanman has since discovered photos of her father with Krauss and Levi at a family party in Florida in 1989, the only time they were all together since before World War II. 

Though Lanman corresponded with Levi in the 1990s, they lost touch. Upon reading the book, she investigated and found a story about her on the Durban Holocaust & Genocide Centre’s Facebook page. She contacted the organisation and connected with a man who had known Levi. 

Through the book, Lanman also discovered that Krauss’s sister, Ellen, with whom she had escaped the Holocaust, had later moved to South Africa with her husband. They lived in Johannesburg where they had a son, Jean-Marc Flaschner, who today lives in Cape Town. The man who knew Levi put Lanman in touch with Flaschner. “Finding family has been a real joy for me,” she says, “especially since I grew up without any uncles, aunts, or cousins.” 

Speaking to the SA Jewish Report, Flaschner says his mother, Ellen, passed away when he was just seven years old. Flaschner met Krauss, his aunt, only about three times very briefly. “I grew up never really knowing what had happened to my mother,” Flaschner says. “Yet her connection to the Holocaust always sits at the back of my mind.” His father was also born in Germany to a gypsy mother and a Jewish father. Flaschner recently travelled to Germany to trace his family’s history there. 

“My mother’s dying wish was that my father made sure I had a Barmitzvah, which he did,” Flaschner says. In terms of his mother’s extended family, aside from Krauss, his only other contact was Levi, his great aunt. So, it meant a lot to him to connect with Lanman and with another relative, Felice Eckhouse, who has also discovered family connections through the book. 

Reflecting on the book’s ripple effect, Stein Koehler says she’s thrilled. “I never thought this would happen,” she says. “It was just something I wanted to do for Renee, because my children and I loved her so much. This would mean so much to her.”