Delayed by Nazis, bar mitzvah to be celebrated by Holocaust survivor
UNITED STATES: Harold Katz didn’t require a crash course in Hebrew before his bar mitzvah next week in Wilmette, Illinois. He started preparing 76 years ago, and his skills never got rusty.
Katz, 89, who lives in a North Side retirement home, was to have celebrated the occasion in Czechoslovakia back in 1941. But that plan - like so many others - was upended by the Holocaust. The Nazis ultimately murdered his father, mother, three brothers and four sisters.
Now his belated bar mitzvah, the Jewish ceremony that marks the transition to manhood, takes place under the shadow of a theological puzzle.
‘‘Why did God let this happen?’’ he asks. ‘‘For all these years, I’ve been asking that. I will never understand.’’
One brother survived the Holocaust. Katz’s own survival came through a chain of happenstance just short of miraculous.
If a single link had broken, he wouldn’t be spending Memorial Day reading from a Torah scroll he commissioned and in a synagogue Chabad of Wilmette - built of imported Jerusalem stone that he donated.
Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, Katz desperately wanted to take refuge in Jerusalem, but the Germans were determined that he wouldn’t escape, and the British were determined that he wouldn’t reach Jerusalem, which they then ruled.
At the time Katz’s bar mitzvah was originally scheduled, his hometown of Tarn, Czechoslovakia, was occupied by Hungarian troops allied with Adolf Hitler. They were determined to be rid of the Jewish townspeople.
‘‘They went up and down the streets, ordering the Jews to get dressed quickly and come to the synagogue,’’ Katz said.
‘‘I remember it as if it was yesterday,’’ he said. ‘‘The trucks coming down the street. How we were loaded up.’’
They were taken to a larger city and, eventually, across the border to Poland.
There they were ordered out of the trucks and left beside the road without food, water or shelter.
‘‘We ate out of garbage cans,’’ Katz said.
His father had a sister living in Poland, and Katz’s family moved in with her. Then his father thought they had a better chance of surviving back in Czechoslovakia. He took the family across the border to Chust, as they feared being recognised in their hometown.
A Hungarian woman offered to smuggle Harold Katz into Budapest, where she was going to rejoin her husband. Katz’s father didn’t object. Perhaps he thought it increased the odds that someone would live to tell the story? So the woman hid Katz under a wagonload of lumber and got him to Hungary.
The rest of the family remained in Chust. In 1944, they were sent to Auschwitz, where more than a million Jews were killed.
‘‘I think: ‘Why didn’t I save them?’’’ Katz said.
His daughter, Lila Katz, said it’s futile to try and reassure her father: ‘‘I tell him: ‘You were a boy, barely 13. What could you do?’’’
In Hungary, Katz made contact with an underground Zionist group that provided him with false identity papers. He wore a cross and a redand-white armband, posing as a member of the Hungarian army’s youth group.
‘‘Three times I was caught,’’ Katz said. ‘‘And three times I got away.’’
As the war was drawing to a close, he was hiding in an abandoned building in Budapest. So, too, he said, was a deserter from the German army, who bragged about killing Jews and Russians.
Liberated by a Russian detachment, Katz told the Jewish commander about the German in the building. He said the Russian soldiers dragged the German out and blindfolded him. The commander handed Katz a pistol.
‘‘I shot him in the back,’’ Katz said.
Did that dissipate his anger? No, he replied. To this day, he feels it.
Katz, then 17, assumed the rest of his family was dead until a survivor of Auschwitz said Katz’s oldest brother was alive. Harold and Maurie Katz found each other, then joined the myriad displaced persons wandering Europe after World War II before making it to the United States. - TNS