Humanity
Nazis shattered her family's store in 1938. She just learned it's still there
By Sydney Page The Washington Post
Published Jan. 31, 2025
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For more than a century, a family-run shoe store in a quiet German town has stood on the same street, weathering wars and bloodshed - a silent witness to history.
Suzanne Cohen, a retired English teacher in Greenwich, New York, grew up hearing stories about the store from her father, Walter Klaus Cohen, whose uncle owned it before World War II.
Cohen's father believed the store was long gone, as was most of his extended Jewish family, whom he understood had perished in the Holocaust.
Recently, though, Cohen made a stunning discovery: the shoe store in Witten, Germany is still open - and, remarkably, her family members are still running it.
"It was beyond exciting to find out that it was still there, and they were there," said Cohen, 64.
Cohen's father escaped Nazi Germany as a 9-year-old boy with his parents and three brothers in 1939, initially going to Panama and later settling in Baltimore. Over the years, Walter Cohen shared fragments of his family history with his children, but much remained unknown.
"It was something he didn't talk about all the time because it was awful," Suzanne Cohen said.
Her father died in 2007. After her mother's death in 2020, Cohen began uncovering more information about her family's survival story. While cleaning out her parents' basement, Cohen and her sisters found hundreds of unlabeled photos with the same unfamiliar faces.
"The fact that my father's family escaped from Nazi Germany, it's kind of amazing how many photos we have from his childhood," Cohen said.
One photo that stood out is a street view of the family shoe store she'd heard about, then named A. Grünebaum. The store first opened in 1864, before it moved in 1890 across the street. Walter Cohen's great-uncle started the store, which sold fancy leather footwear.
Flipping through the old photos, Suzanne Cohen decided it was time to do a deep dive into her family history.
"It inspired me to start to search," she said.
She went to genealogy platform MyHeritage to build her family tree and was connected to a distant relative named Dagmar Bassarak in Germany. Bassarak told Cohen all about the family shoe store and that it was remarkably still open.
"It was just amazing. I had no idea that they had survived the Holocaust," said Cohen, who got in touch with the current owners of the shoe store - her two distant cousins, Werner Grünebaum and his daughter, Kirsten Bonanati-Grünebaum - to introduce herself.
The store was smashed and shut down during the November Pogrom in 1938 - also known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass - in which thousands of Jewish-owned shops and synagogues were destroyed throughout Nazi Germany and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, including Cohen's grandfather.
"During World War I, my grandfather had actually saved the life of his commanding officer, Dr. Alfred Meyer," said Cohen. "Alfred Meyer went on to become one of the head Nazis."
Cohen believes the reason her father's immediate family was able to flee the country ahead of the war was because her grandfather had saved Meyer, and in return, he helped get him out of jail and warned him that he and his family needed to leave Germany immediately. The family of six managed to escape together before it was too late.
The rest of the extended family, though, stayed, and many did not survive.
"My great-grandparents lost the majority of their family," said Cohen, referring to her father's paternal grandparents. Her father believed most of his mother's family members were murdered, too - including his mother's brother, Fritz Grünebaum, who owned the shoe store.
Now Cohen knows what really unfolded. Following the November Pogrom and the destruction of the store, Grünebaum was sent to Theresienstadt, a ghetto-labor camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. He remained there until he was liberated in 1945. The Grünebaum family believes he was spared because his wife was not Jewish.
Grünebaum returned to Witten to reopen the shoe store in its original spot - though he sold a portion of the building on the corner. His family has been operating it ever since.
In 1970, Grünebaum's son, Werner Grünebaum, now 82, took over the store, and he runs it with his daughter, Kirsten Bonanati-Grünebaum, 48. The store is now called "Schuh Grünebaum," which translates to "Shoe Grünebaum."
Cohen - who wrote a book about her father's escape from Nazi Germany - planned a trip to Europe to meet her long-lost family and visit her father's childhood home.
"After 80 years of separation, her family is finally reunited," said Elisabeth Zetland, a senior researcher at MyHeritage.
In addition to the Grünebaums, Cohen found other relatives through MyHeritage, including Peter Gerritsen, a second cousin from the Netherlands, whose mother narrowly survived the Holocaust while her mother and twin sisters did not.
"He was thrilled to find me, and I was thrilled to find him," said Cohen.
Cohen and her son, Taylor Cohen, went to the Netherlands in April to visit Gerritsen, and he drove them to Germany to meet their German relatives. They visited the historic family shoe store.
"It was just joyous," said Cohen, adding that they brought back several pairs of shoes for their family. "They're really great people."
Kirsten Bonanati-Grünebaum said showing Cohen and her son the store was a reminder of the family's resilience and triumph in the face of tragedy.
"I'm proud of the 160 years in my family's hands," she said.
Since returning from the trip nearly a year ago, Cohen and her relatives have been in constant contact.
"They're like my best friends; I hear from these people all the time," she said. "It's just wonderful."
Cohen said this has deepened her resolve to discover more about her family's past and share it with future generations.
"I'll be working on this for the rest of my life," she said.
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