Katharina Cahen-Brach

Katharina Cahen-Brach is commemorated in Frankfurt by a Stolperstein, a small brass plaque set into the pavement. You see Holocaust remembrance placed directly into Frankfurt’s everyday streetscape. Artist Gunter Demnig initiated the project to commemorate victims of the Holocaust. The plaque connects one Frankfurt life with the city’s history of Jewish persecution.

Katharina, often called Käthe, shared her life with Fritz Cahen-Brach, a Jewish paediatrician born in Frankfurt. He studied medicine in Frankfurt, Göttingen and Munich. He opened his children’s practice in Frankfurt during the 1920s and belonged to Eintracht Frankfurt’s sporting community. Nazi persecution cost him his health-insurance licence in 1933, and his practice could no longer support them by 1937. The couple left Germany in 1938, travelling first to Holland and later settling in Los Angeles. There, Fritz became Fred C. Brock and requalified as a doctor, while Kate worked as a nanny. Their son Steven was born in 1943, while Fritz’s parents and other relatives were murdered in concentration camps.