Dayton-area Holocaust survivor, author dies at 100
Robert Kahn, a Dayton-area holocaust survivor, has died at the age of 100.
Before calling the Miami Valley home, Kahn was born in Mannheim, Germany in 1923.
Many people who have gone to the National Museum of the US Air Force may have walked by a piece of history that belonged to Kahn without noticing.
Kahn’s violin, which symbolizes one of the most barbaric acts of anti-Semitic violence, is on display at the museum.
On Nov. 9, 1938, also known as “Kristallnacht” or “Night of Broken Glass”, 15-year-old Kahn was on his way home when he saw a mob of nazis throwing furniture and other belongings from his family’s apartment through windows onto the yard below.
While Nazis destroyed Kahn’s apartment his mother locked herself in one of the rooms while his father was beaten in front of him, according to Marshall Weiss with the Jewish Federation of Greater Dayton.
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When Kahn asked the Nazis to stop, they made him pick up his violin, took him to the balcony, and ordered him to play happy German songs.
Before fleeing from Germany to America, Kahn hid the violin in the attic of his family’s apartment.
While in America, Kahn served in the U.S. Air Force in WWII and established a life in Dayton.
When he returned from war Kahn wrote the janitor of his family’s apartment building in Mannheim. The janitor found the violin and sent it to him in America.
“For him that violin symbolized the event. The event where his family was brutalized and split up and where he had to witness that. Throughout his long life, Mr. Khan realized that the violin was emblematic of not just his story but a wider story of suffering and brutalization and it could help people to understand why the Second World War was fought,” Doug Lantry, historian and curator at the National Museum of the US Air Force.
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Lantry and Weiss said this marked the start of Kahns’ journey of talking about the trauma and experiences he witnessed as a Jewish man in Nazi Germany.
The violin was put on display at the National Museum of the US Air Force around 20 years ago.
During his lifetime Kahn spoke to hundreds of student groups and was very active in his community.
“He was not a bystander, he was an upstander,” Weiss said.
In 2016 Kahn published “The Hard Road of Dreams: Remembering Not to Forget” about his and his family’s experiences in Nazi Germany.
Weiss said the book was Kahn “purging it from his soul onto the page.”
Services will be held for Kahn at 3 pm on Sunday, April 7 at Temple Israel. Internment at Riverview Cemetery followed by a memorial meal for family and friends at Temple Israel.
