Silver ice cream spoon with floral engraving saved by young German Jewish refugee

Ingrid Neuhaus Kovary (1921-2009) was born in Hamburg, Germany, on 2 August 1921, to Julius and Marie Eisner Neuhaus. She had two siblings, Annelore, born 23 September 1923, and Hans, born 20 July 1925. Her father was a leather merchant, and had a successful import-export business in Hamburg, and the family was Jewish, but assimilated. Following the rise of the Nazis and Hitler's appointment as chancellor in 1933, the Neuhaus family joined a synagogue in reaction to the growing anti-Semitism in the city. That same year, Julius' business was seized by the Nazis, and as anti-Semitic regulations increased during the following years, so did the family's hardships. By 1938, the parents made plans to emigrate, and sent their children ahead on Kinderstransports, with Annelore and Hans arriving in Britain in January 1939, and Ingrid in the following month. Julius and Marie were unable to leave Germany, however, and in November 1941, were deported to the Minsk ghetto, in the German-occupied Soviet Union, and they were subsequently murdered. During the war years in Britain, Ingrid attended secretarial school, and in 1945, went to work for the United States War Department in the Civil Censorship Division. In 1947, after receiving sponsorship from the parents of a friend of hers, Ingrid emigrated to the United States and settled in Ohio. She attended Ohio State University, and it was there that she met Tom Kovary, who had immigrated from Czechoslovakia, and who she married in 1950. The Kovarys had two daughters, and relocated to New York, where Tom Kovary became a professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the State University of New York in Cortland, NY. Ingrid Kovary passed away in September 2009.

The silver ice-cream spoon was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2015 by Vally Kovary, the daughter of Ingrid Neuhaus.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Vally Kovary