Charles Cohen was the 11th of the 12 children of Izaak Cohen and Elizabeth van Lier. He was born on 29 July 1882 in Rotterdam and worked there as a wholesaler in meat and as a butcher. He married Elisabeth Stad on 13 July 1910, who was born 31 March 1885 in Rotterdam as a daughter of Meijer Stad and Heintje Boekbinder. The couple Cohen-Stad had two children, namely Izaak on 2 June 1911 and Hendrika on 22 Augustu 1917.
On 19 May 1938 their son Izaak Cohen married at the age of 26 to the 27-year old Bertha Blauw, a daughter of David Blauw and Alice van Dantzig and who was born on 7 December 1910 in Rotterdam. On 9 December 1940 their son David Charles was born. Izaak, Bertha and David Charles have survived the Holocaust and just after war's end their address in Rotterdam was Bergschelaan 98b.
Their daughter Hendrika Cohen married at the age of 23 - presumably about 1940/1941 in Rotterdam - the ± 33 year old Salomon Hamburger, a son of Abraham Hamburger and Celina Tabak. They then lived at Stadhoudersweg 147b, where their son David Charles was born on 15 February 1942 and who survived the Holocaust. Hendrika and her husband Salomon Hamburger however were killed during the Shoah.
The day after their wedding in July 1910, Charles Cohen and his wife Elisabeth Stad moved into a house in the Jonker Fransstraat 85a. In the years thereafter, relocations followed to the Van der Werffstraat 58a, the Jonker Fransstraat 29a, the Hugo de Grootstraat 12b, until at the time of the compulsory registration of the Jews in the Netherlands at the Jewish Council in 1942, they ended up at Statenweg 36a.
It appeared that Elisabeth Cohen-Stad had been hospitalized in the Jewish Hospital at Schietbaanlaan 42 in Rotterdam however unknown when, presumably after summer 1942. However on German command, the Jewish Hospital was emptied on 26 February 1943 and 200 sick, elderly and 61 staff were carried off via Loods 24 to Westerbork and on 2 March 1943 deported to Sobibor, where all on arrival on 5 March 1943 were murdered in the gas chambers there, among them also Elisabeth Cohen-Stad.
The Rotterdam police archives show that Charles Cohen was arrested by the Rotterdam police on March 26, 1942 and was held “in custody” for the Sicherheits Polizei and the German intelligence service but that he was released again for unknown reasons on April 4, 1942. When his wife was in hospital, Charles might have been made efforts to go into hiding, which partly succeeded. But in the end he was still arrested on 24 August 1944 and imprisoned in Westerbork in the penal barrack 67. On 3 September 1944 he was deported in a so-called penal transport to Auschwitz, where he was immediately killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau on arrival there on 6 September 1944.
Sources include the City Archive of Rotterdam, family registration cards of Izaak Cohen, Charles Cohen, Izaak Cohen (1911) and Salomon Hamburger; Arrestee cards from the Rotterdam Police Archives of Charles Cohen; website Joodserfgoed Rotterdam.nl/Joods Ziekenhuis Megon Hatsedek; the file cabinet of the Jewish Council, registration cares of Charles Cohen, Elisabeth Cohen-Stad, Bertha Blauw and David Charles Cohen, Hendrika Hamburger-Cohen, Salomon Hamburger and Charles Hamburger and the wikipedia website jodentransporten vanuit nederland.nl.