Bina Kahn was born on March 9, 1909 as the daughter of Hartwig and Therese Kahn in Bischofsheim, Frankfurter Straße 50. She was the second child of this marriage. Her older brother was Friedrich Kahn.

After elementary school in Bischofsheim, she attended the secondary school for girls in Mainz from 1918 to 1925, then the women's work school there until 1827. She later married the bank director Friedrich Levy-Oswald from Blumenthal an der Unterweser. Their son Bernd was born on December 28, 1932, and their daughter Marion was born on February 11, 1936. According to her son Bernd, Joseph Goebbels is said to have personally intervened at Deutsche Bank about his father's dismissal.

The family lived in various places, in Berlin, Frankfurt am Main and in 1937 in Sofia/Bulgaria. They then managed to escape via Odessa, Moscow and Vladivostok to Yokohama in Japan. There Friedrich Levy-Oswald changed his name to Frederick Lambert. In 1941 they were finally able to move to San Francisco in the USA. A year later, Frederick found work as a financial accountant and Bina Lambert opened a knitwear shop, “Sabina Lambert's Knitting Studio,” in 1947.

Together with her brother Dr. Friedrich Kahn, she sought "compensation" or "reparation" in the legal sense after the Holocaust - an arduous and lengthy undertaking. After both named themselves as Hartwig and Theresa Kahn's heirs in 1947, the Groß-Gerau district court issued them a joint inheritance certificate in 1949. On the basis of the “Federal Law on Compensation for Victims of National Socialist Persecution (BEG, 1953)”, a Cologne law firm took over their representation in March 1954.

The first phase with various applications for compensation ended in April 1957 with a settlement: The state of Hesse paid DM 6,450 "for 43 full months" to both heirs. This means that the country paid DM 75 per person per month for 43 months of flight and expulsion. Furthermore, the siblings were granted compensation in August 1958 for “damage to professional advancement” and in May 1960 several thousand Marks were paid out “for the confiscation of household goods, furnishings and precious metal objects”. A late compensation for robbery and vandalism during the November pogrom in 1938.

In the fall of 1991, Sabina Lambert visited her old hometown together with other former Bischofsheim Jews as part of the Mainz Encounter Weeks.

She died on August 12, 2008 in San Francisco/USA and was buried in the Jewish cemetery “Home of Peace Cemetery” in Colma/USA.

Her son Bernd became a cultural anthropologist. He died on January 3, 2015 and is buried in Ithaca, New York. Marion married into the Brackett family. She died on October 21, 2016 in Oakland, California/USA.

(Helmut Helm)