St. Louis’ remarkable stories from the Holocaust: Irene Baron

Since 1979, Vida “Sister” Goldman Prince has been Chairman of the Oral Histories Project, at the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum. The project is dedicated to recording and preserving audio interviews of not only Holocaust Survivors, but also liberators of Nazi concentration camps and other non-Jewish witnesses living in Europe during World War II.

The museum was one of the first to begin gathering oral history projects so these voices and photographs will be displayed and future generations will continue to be witnesses to this catastrophic period of world history.

In partnership with the Jewish Light, The St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum is allowing us to republish a portion of these Oral Histories project as a celebration of life and a crucial part of honoring and remembering the past. Please follow the provided links to additional recordings.

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“The game was surviving.”

— Irene Baron

A Brief Bio

Irene Baron was born in Munich, Germany to Dr. Herbert and Johanna (Reinemann) Jacobi on March 11, 1916. Before the war, she completed twelve years of schooling. During the war, she was trained in the Nursing Auxiliary in England. Although she was never incarcerated in a concentration camp, she was a refugee in England from 1939-40, lived in an internment camp on the Isle of Man from 1940-42, worked as an auxiliary nurse (England) from 1942-45, and lived in the Stepney Jewish Settlement from 1945-47.

Of her immediate family, a brother and sister survived while her mother, father and aunts perished in Auschwitz. Mrs. Baron came to St. Louis on March 30, 1947 because she had “nowhere else to go – brother lived here.” She married Kurt Baron and has two children.