Ines Jacobsohn. Collection

Ines Jacobsohn was born on 2 June 1903 in Vienna, Austria, as the daughter of Maurice Jacobsohn and Eva Adler. Before the war, the family lived in Antwerp. Upon the invasion of Belgium by Nazi-Germany on 10 May 1940, Ines, her brother Joseph and their widowed mother Eva fled to France where they settled in the village of Villepinte in the Aude prefecture. In the summer of 1942, the authorities came to arrest Joseph. When they were unable to find him, they took Ines instead. She was detained at the Rivesaltes camp in southern France from where she wrote several letters to her mother and brother Joseph in Villepinte as well as to her sister ‘Pauleke’ Jacobsohn who was living with her husband Edgard Braunschweig in Lausanne, Switzerland. In her letters Ines recounts life in the camp as well as her hopes and fears for the future. Ines was transferred from Rivesaltes to Drancy near Paris early in September 1942 and did not survive deportation from Drancy to Auschwitz-Birkenau via Transport 31 on 11 September 1942, although she was able to throw a postcard addressed to her family from the train. Ines’s mother Eva, her brother Joseph and her sister ‘Pauleke’ survived the war and returned to Belgium after the liberation.

The nephews of Ines Jacobsohn kindly permitted the digitisation of the items in their family archive in preparation of the publication of "Drancy-Auschwitz", the commemoration book for Jews from Belgium deported from France, published by Kazerne Dossin in 2015.

David and Joel Jacobson, nephews of Ines Jacobsohn, 2015