Ilse Rothschild papers

Ilse Rothschild (1916-2011) was born in Bad Hersfeld, Germany to Eduard Cohn and Hedwig Katzenstein Cohn. She lived in Antwerp until 1938 and survived the war in Brussels and Namur under the pseudonym Yvonne Collin. Following liberation, she worked for the United States Army in various roles, including as a language teacher. She married Erich Rothschild (1913-1995), who was born in Friedberg, Germany to Louis Rothschild and Rega Simon and trained as a pharmaceutical chemist at the University of Zurich. He spent at least one year of the war at the Gordola labor camp in Switzerland. Ilse and Erich were married in Locarno in 1945, had their first son, and immigrated to the United States in 1949 and lived in Providence and Barrington, RI. Ilse’s brother Ludwig Cohn (1907-1942) was interned at the Saint- Cyprien and Les Milles concentration camps, transferred from Drancy to Auschwitz on convoy 19 in August 1942, and perished. Ilse’s father died before the Holocaust, her mother was deported to Minsk in 1941 and perished, and her sisters Cilly Marx and Helen Tockus (later Tocker) survived. The Ilse Rothschild papers consists of Rothschild’s postwar Belgian identification card, a 1940 letter from her brother, Ludwig Cohn, describing his railroad ordeal from Belgium to Saint Cyprien as an interned enemy alien, his 1942 Red Cross letter indicating that Les Milles was being liquidated, four photographs of Cohn at the Les Milles internment camp, and four photographs of Rothschild’s husband, Erich Rothschild, working with oxen and potatoes at the Gordola labor camp in 1942. Fritz Tockus, Ilse Rothschild’s brother-in-law, and Freddy Horn are also identified on a May 1941 picture postcard.