A bar mitzvah, 76 years late
Harold Katz didn’t require a crash course in Hebrew before his bar mitzvah next week in Wilmette, Ill. He started preparing 76 years ago, and his skills never got rusty.
Katz, 89, who lives in a 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 asked me. “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.
The distinctive, whitish stone is freighted with meaning for Katz. Virtually every building in Jerusalem is clad in it. When the sun hits at the right angle, the city seems to shimmer.
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 recognized in their hometown. A Hungarian woman offered to smuggle 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?’ ”