(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — A Northwest Side park will have the same name, but with a new meaning.
The Chicago Park District board voted to name Kolmar Park in the Old Irving Park neighborhood for Gertrud Kolmar, a Jewish poet who perished in the Holocaust.
Kolmar Park was originally named after the street it’s located on. The street got its name from a town on the border of France and Germany.
Thursday’s board vote shifts the focus to Gertrud Kolmar, who was born in 1894 in Berlin. Her work was first published in 1917, but Kolmar didn’t gain recognition as a writer until after her death.
Kolmar’s siblings fled Nazi Germany, but she remained to care for her father. In 1941, she was forced to work in a German armaments factory, and she was sent to Auschwitz in 1943 and died there.
Kolmar's great-nephew, Paul Chodziesner of Australia, said her work and the Holocaust cannot be forgotten, “to help future generations understand and never forget what millions of people and families endured in these horrendous times.”
Kolmar Park is the 72nd Chicago park named in honor of a woman.
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