Every life begins as a universe of possibility. On May 13, 1943, in the city of Groningen, Netherlands, a new universe came into being. Her name was Sara Cohen. She was a cherished daughter, born to Carolina and Joseph Cohen, weighing a precious six pounds and four ounces. In any other time, her arrival would have been a moment of pure, unblemished joy—a promise of first steps, first words, and a future waiting to be written.

But Sara was born into a world consumed by darkness. The joy of her birth was shadowed by a profound absence. She would never feel her father’s embrace or hear his voice. One month before she drew her first breath, Joseph Cohen had been deported, swept away by the Nazi regime to a concentration camp, his fate unknown to the small family he was forced to leave behind.

In the face of this crushing reality, her mother, Carolina, held on. With unimaginable strength, she created a life for Sara and her two other small children. Their home at J. C. Kapteynlaan 7b became a fragile sanctuary, a small pocket of love and warmth in a world that was growing colder and more hateful by the day. For a few brief months, it was a place where a baby’s cry was answered with a mother’s comfort, a place where life, however precarious, continued.

But their home could not protect them forever. The darkness found them.

On February 8, 1944, the sanctuary was broken. Carolina and her three children were taken from their home and transported to the Westerbork transit camp. From there, they were packed into a train and sent on the unforgiving journey to Auschwitz. Upon arrival, the family was torn apart by a final, monstrous act of selection. All three children—including baby Sara—were deemed unfit for labor and sent directly to the gas chambers.

Sara Cohen was only eight months old.

She never learned to walk, never spoke her mother’s name, never saw a world free from fear. Her life was a brief, flickering candle extinguished before it ever had a chance to truly burn.

When we speak of the Holocaust, we often speak in numbers too large to comprehend—six million souls. But the true weight of that number can only be felt when we remember the individual lives that form it. Today, we remember Sara. We remember her not as a number or a statistic, but as a child who deserved a future. We remember her as a baby who should have grown up, known love, and had children of her own.

May her name, her smile, and her memory live forever. May we never forget the cost of hatred.