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

Ingrid Neuhaus was born in Hamburg, Germany, on August 2, 1921, to Julius and Marie Eisner Neuhaus. She had two siblings, Annelore, born September 23, 1923, and Hans, born July 20, 1925. Her father was a leather merchant and the family was Jewish, but assimilated. In January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and soon laws were passed to restrict Jewish participation in German society. In 1933, the Neuhaus family joined a synagogue in reaction to the growing anti-Semitism in the city. The two younger children were sent to England on a Kindertransport in January 1939; Ingrid arrived there by ferry in February. Their parents were deported to the Minsk ghetto in Belorussia in November 1941 and murdered there in 1942 by the Germans. In 1947, Ingrid emigrated to the United States and settled in Ohio. She met a college student, Tom Kovary. Tom, with his brother and father, fled Czechoslovakia and arrived in the US in 1940. Both brothers joined the US Army: Tom was in Military Intelligence stateside; Ernest in combat, landing with the infantry on D-Day. All but one member of their extended family in Europe perished during the war. Ingrid and Tom married on July 30, 1950, and had two daughters. In 1953, they moved to New York so that Tom could continue his academic studies at Cornell University. In 1959, he became a professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the State University of New York in Cortland, NY, and retired in 1985. Tom, 68, died of cancer in 1988. Ingrid, 88, passed away in September 2009.