Retiree gets 20-year education at Holocaust Center

After spending most of his career in the insurance business, Barney Cohen took early retirement in 1973. But he didn't really retire. He continued to work in various jobs in the computer industry until 1981, when he retired again.

But even that wasn't a real retirement. Cohen was only 64. He didn't want to sit at home, he wanted something to do. And that something, he said, had to be "personally interesting to me and socially meaningful to the community."

So he began volunteering in San Francisco at the Holocaust Center of Northern California. And after working there for 20 years, he finally retired for real, this time, this past summer.

His work there began when it was known as the Holocaust Library. He went to meet the librarian, who told him what the job entailed.

"I started shelving books in 1981, and apparently I shelved them so well, that in 1983 I was elected to the board of directors," he said in a recent interview at the center. He remained on the board until last year.

When he first started, he worked up to four days a week, from morning to about 3 or 4 p.m., commuting from Santa Rosa. In the last few years, he's worked two days a week, commuting from his home in Walnut Creek on BART and then taking the bus to the Richmond District.

Now 84, Cohen wears large-framed glasses and takes a visitor into a crowded room, in the back of the center, where he's spent so many hours.

Born and raised in northern Indiana, Cohen is the son of an immigrant father and an American-born mother. He married his wife, Nina, during the war years, and after World War II, they moved to California. Nina Cohen is a nutritional biochemist who was on the faculty at U.C. Berkeley for many years.

Cohen served in the Navy during World War II, but that's as close as his personal connection to the Holocaust gets. "Neither of my parents had relatives directly impacted," he said.

Nonetheless, he was always interested in Jewish communities in Europe, where his relatives were from.

After taking the volunteer position, he began to learn on the job. Cohen went to Israel to attend a five-week course on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism at Yad VaShem, and he also was invited to Poland with a group studying Polish Jewish history.

While in Poland, he visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and some of the other camps. But what left the greatest impression was the Jewish cemetery in Krakow.

"The Nazis had crushed all the gravestones, which went back hundreds of years," he said. "It wasn't enough that they killed living Jews, but they had to destroy the memory of dead Jews too."

In 1988, Cohen became the Holocaust Center's archivist. The center received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the conservation of archival material.

The archives contain documents and artifacts from survivors and their families, most of them local. And it also holds an extensive photography collection, especially of the U.S. Army liberating the camps.

"The archive provides a documented history of the whole Holocaust period," he said, adding that the evidence was there to prove any Holocaust denier wrong.

Cohen has spent a lot of time making the archives user-friendly, so people can find things now that he's no longer there to guide them.

"A collection doesn't mean anything if you can't find anything in it," he said.

One thing that Cohen has learned over the past 20 years is that even for those who know a lot about the Holocaust, there is still so much more to learn.

"It isn't a closed subject," he said. There are scholarly debates over several Holocaust-related topics, including whether the United States, the Soviet Union, and David Ben-Gurion and his allies could have done more.

Cohen has never been paid for his work at the Holocaust Center, and even the trips he has taken, he paid for himself. The S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation recognized his efforts, naming him Volunteer of the Year in 1995.

"The word 'volunteer' doesn't cover what Barney did in this period of time," said Mark Schickman, chairman of the Holocaust Center. "The commitment he showed would be laudable from a career professional, so you can't thank enough what he has given to the institution and research about the Holocaust in general."

And then there is Cohen's personal satisfaction. "I was dealing with an activity that not only sought to interpret the past, but to prevent it from happening again."