Vancouver historian received KPU honorary degree for piecing together German-Jewish family stories

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Sharon Meen, a Vancouver historian who works to recover the histories of German-Jewish families up to the 1700s, received an honorary doctorate degree from Kwantlen Polytechnic University during a convocation ceremony last month. 

The honorary degree recognizes those who are exceptionally distinguished, have made significant contributions and accomplishments, and whose excellence reflects positively upon KPU. 

“It was just wonderful. I was chuffed,” Meen says. “I get lots of recognition in Germany, I don’t need recognition, but I was really pleased to get recognition here.”  

Growing up in Toronto, Meen learned how to speak German while in highschool. Meen then studied to become a German historian, focusing on the Nazi period of history, specifically the perpetrators of the Nazi seizure of power. 

She got involved with piecing together the histories of German-Jewish families when she began volunteering at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) and had her first encounter with the Holocaust survivor community. 

“I was able to bring my fluency in German to survivors of Poland, Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania because they could not read the documents they were receiving from the German government. So I was able to tell them what they were receiving letters about,” Meen says. “It opened up the opportunity and I pounced on it.” 

Through her work as a volunteer, the opportunity to work on two projects allowed Meen to dive deep into the histories of German-Jewish families, one being the story of Manfred Rosengarten who was born into a Jewish family in Themar, a city in the state of Thüringen, Germany. 

In 1939, Rosengarten and his family fled Europe, eventually finding refuge in the United States.  

In 1983, Rosengarten and his non-Jewish schoolmates who survived the war and still lived in Themar began writing letters back and forth until he passed away, which his son, Andy Rosengarten, donated to the VHEC. Meen then took on the job to read and summarize these letters, leading to a journey of rediscovery and reassembling the Jewish community of Themar. 

Meen also played a big part in the Hahn project, the 400 year history of one family that lived in Western Germany. At the center of the story is Max Raphael Hahn, who lived from 1880 until he was deported in 1942 and murdered. Hahn had a collection of Judaica, Jewish ceremonial art, of around 157 pieces of sterling silver which was confiscated by the Nazis. 

“One of my jobs was to write the story of a family, but another [part of] my job has been to see if we can find some of the items of that collection. It was a very valuable and beautiful collection,” Meen says. 

Meen did just that by finding a piece of Hahn’s Judaica collection in the vault of a museum in Hamburg, Germany, and in 2018 the museum restituted the item back to the Hahn family.

While Meen has dedicated much of her life towards helping educate others about the history of German-Jewish families and the Holocaust, her favourite part about her work as a historian is meeting the descendants of these families. 

“The story of the Holocaust, just goes down, it does not get better. It’s very depressing. What makes it all worthwhile [and] makes me happy is bringing together the descendants and then meeting them. It’s wonderful,” Meen says. 

Meen is neither German nor Jewish, yet she sees Canada’s actions after the Second World War as a fire to fuel her passion. Throughout the Nazi’s 12-year rule in Germany, Canada admitted less than 5,000 Jewish refugees, one of the lowest records of any democracies. 

“It’s just awful,” Meen says. “I’m Canadian to the tips of my toes and of that generation that should have done more. It’s not payback time, but listen up time, Canada.” 

To learn more about Meen’s work, visit www.sharonmeen.ca/.