Suse Katz

Frankel: Good evening.
KATZ: Good evening.

Frankel: Let us begin by having you state your full name, your birth name, date of birth, city, and country.
KATZ: My full name is Suse Katz, and I was born August 23, 1926. My maiden name was Suse Grombacher, and I was born in Germany in Ludwigshafen am Rhein.

Frankel: Can you spell your maiden name?
KATZ: Yes, it’s Grombacher [spells out].

Frankel: Can you tell us a little bit about the household, your family?
KATZ: We lived in the town of Ludwigshafen, which was an industrial city. It was primarily there because there was a large IG Farben plant. My father owned a store where he sold everything from beds, comforters, blankets, linens, to soap and things like that. The store was on the ground floor, of course, on the street level. There was an apartment building up above, and we had a very large apartment up on the third floor. The family consisted of my mother, my father, and my brother who is three and a half years older than I am. Then we had some servants who also stayed with us. That was the household.

Frankel: Can you give us the names of your parents?
KATZ: My father’s name was Adolf Grombacher. My mother’s name was Betty Grombacher.

Frankel: And your brother?
KATZ: My brother’s name is Gerd Grombacher.

Frankel: What about grandparents?
KATZ: I had one set of grandparents who were still alive when I was a child. They were my maternal grandparents. Their name was Erlebacher [spells out]. They lived in a small town, which was called Obergimpern. We always thought it was a great big trip, but since I’ve been back often, it’s really not a very long trip at all. They were fee handlers. It sounds very fancy if I say they dealt in cattle, but my grandfathers on both sides bought and sold cows and horses in a farming community. My paternal grandparents were no longer alive by the time I was born.

Frankel: Can you spell the city where your grandparents lived?
KATZ: The ones that were alive. Obergimpern [spells out]. 

Frankel: Do you know anything about your paternal grandparents?
KATZ: Only that I knew the house they lived in because my uncle, one of their sons, my father’s brother, lived in that house when I was a child, and that was in Bretten [spells out]. They did the same thing as my other grandparents did, the same kind of business.

Frankel: How far back do you know about your family history living in Germany?
KATZ: I only know about the grandparents, and that both my mother and father were brought up in these small towns. Each one of these towns would have a few Jewish families, and the Jewish families always either did the buying and selling of the cattle, or they would own a dry goods store, things like that. One of the towns, Bretten, was somewhat larger. Obergimpern was very small, but there was a small synagogue, and there were two or three other Jewish families who lived maybe five kilometers away. On Saturdays, when we used to be there in the summer, we used to stand out in the road and wait to see if they were coming because if they came, there’d be a minyan. Then the children would run and say, “Open up the door of the synagogue because there’ll be a minyan today.” Or we would say, “They aren’t coming,” and then we wouldn’t open up the doors because we couldn’t have a service.

Frankel: So that was in Ludwigshafen?
KATZ: No, that was in the small town, in Obergimpern.

Frankel: Your grandparents?
KATZ: Yes, my grandparents.

Frankel: Did your parents have any siblings? Did you have an extended family?
KATZ: Yes, my mother had one brother and one sister. One of the brothers lived in Bretten. The other sister lived in Karlsruhe. My father came from a very large family, and I must say, I never was able to keep track of them all. But some lived in Karlsruhe and one uncle lived in Mannheim. One uncle and one aunt had come to the United States. They’re the people we came to.

Frankel: Do you recall if there was a cemetery in the city? Do you recall having relatives buried in the towns where your grandparents lived?
KATZ: No, I don’t recall the cemetery. I’ve since been to it in my adulthood, but I didn’t remember the cemetery from my childhood.

Frankel: Would you say, describing the apartment you lived in, having service, that you had a comfortable life? Can you describe it?
KATZ: We had a very comfortable life, yes. Extremely comfortable.

Frankel: Can you tell us a story that would illustrate that?
KATZ: The apartment was large. I remember that we had a living room and we had a dining room. There was a music room. We had a grand piano. My brother and I had a room together. When he got older, he had another room in the apartment. My mother never did anything at all is what I remember. She did help my father in the business, and I think she did some bookkeeping, but she did not work in the household at all. When I reflect on that as an adult, I realize that she came from very small circumstances, and where they lived in the small town, she must have done lots of housework and things, but she didn’t get married until she was in her 30s. My father was in his 40s. He had been in the First World War, and he didn’t get married until he had his business established. I guess he was doing quite well, so they lived fairly lavishly. I remember my mother was brought breakfast in bed, and the children would be brought in and we’d say, “Guten morgen, Mama.” Lived this bourgeois European life.

Frankel: What do you know about the education your parents received?
KATZ: I think they both went to the equivalent of having finished high school, but not any further than that.

Frankel: How about Jewish life?
KATZ: My parents were very religious, which was somewhat unusual for German Jews. But everyone on both sides, paternal and maternal, grandparents and everyone, some of them were even more religious than we were. We turned on the lights on the Sabbath, and we weren’t quite so bad. But I had an aunt and an uncle who sat in the dark until somebody came and turned on the light. We kept kosher in the house, and the servants had to learn how to do that. We went to synagogue every Friday night and every Saturday. It was a synagogue where the women sat in the balcony and the men were downstairs. I never saw a yarmulke until I came to the United States because the men all were top hats when they went to synagogue, and they kept the top hats on.

Frankel: What about children? Little boys?
KATZ: The boys would have hats on or caps or hats like fedoras, but I had never seen a yarmulke.

Frankel: Was there one synagogue in Ludwigshafen?
KATZ: There was one in Ludwigshafen. There were several synagogues in Mannheim, which had a large Jewish community, but Ludwigshafen didn’t have that many Jews and there was just one.

Frankel: Were the services just weekdays?
KATZ: I think there were services Friday night and on Saturday. I’m sure they did morning prayers. I know that my father went sometimes. He didn’t go every morning though.

Frankel: How about your education?
KATZ: I went as far as third grade, and I was in the public school. But then after third grade, the plan was for me to go to the Catholic school. My mother had been educated in Catholic schools, and that’s where I was going to be going. My brother was already in the gymnasium [pronounces gim-náh-si-um] when we left.

Frankel: What about Jewish education for you?
KATZ: I remember once a week there would be religious education in the school. All the Catholic children would go into one room, and all the Jewish children would go into another room. The Jewish children, there were maybe five or six of us, would go down in the basement. Somebody from the synagogue would come, and that’s when we had Hebrew class.

Frankel: Do you have any memories of that? Was that a pleasant time?
KATZ: No, it was awful. It was like every Hebrew school you’ve ever heard of. The children behaved horribly; the teacher wasn’t able to control us. I did learn how to read Hebrew, but I think it was mostly from my father that I learned it.

Frankel: Did your father teach you at home?
KATZ: Yes, he did. He saw that I wasn’t getting anyplace, and he felt it was important that I knew how to read Hebrew, so he taught me. I did used to be able to read it. I’ve forgotten it now. 

Frankel: What about Jewish holidays? Do you have any memories of celebrating?
KATZ: We observed them quite religiously. I remember I didn’t have to fast on Yom Kippur. Well, I had to fast in the morning, but because I was a little girl I could stop and eat something by noon. My parents fasted. They were in synagogue all day, and the same thing on Rosh Hashanah. I remember on Passover we always had a Seder. My father did the Seder and some of the relatives would be there. It was always at our house. He was the one they considered the most knowledgeable about Judaism.

Frankel: What about your relationship with the non-Jewish population, going to school …?
KATZ: I had non-Jewish friends and never thought anything about it at all. I don’t think my parents had very many non-Jewish friends. They knew people in business, but I don’t think they had a lot of non-Jewish friends. I did. I played with the kids I saw at school. There was never a problem until the Hitler-Jugend [Youth] came along.

Frankel: Do you remember visiting each other’s homes?
KATZ: Yes. I remember two friends, particularly, and we would visit each other’s homes. I know one of their fathers was a teacher, but I don’t remember anything about the other one’s family.

Frankel: Do you have any memories of Christmas celebration, if you …?
KATZ: No, we never did Christmas, of course. The governess that I had — her name was Deda [pronounces Deh-dah] — she was a very important person in my life. I guess it was just really hard for her to accept that there wasn’t any Christmas, so she really encouraged the family to make a huge fuss about Hanukkah. I remember there were candles and lots of presents and so on, just on the first night, probably from her encouragement, and she also, because we couldn’t talk about St. Nicholas — my parents, I guess had told her, “Well, Jewish children have the Hanukkah kind” — so she was really into the Hanukkah kind to make up for it [laughs]. She used to talk about the Hanukkah kind all the time, that she’d talked to the Hanukkah kind and told him or her — I don’t even know what sex it was — that she had told him what I wanted and so on.

Frankel: She was your governess?
KATZ: She was my kindermädchen, governess. She came when I was born and stayed until I left. Then I had a long relationship with her later on.

Frankel: What was her name, you said?
KATZ: We called her Deda.

Frankel: Is that a nickname?
KATZ: I really don’t know where that came from. Her name was Hedwig Bachoff [sp?], but we called her Deda.

Frankel: How about your brother? Did he have any non-Jewish friends?
KATZ: From what I remember, he had both non-Jewish and Jewish friends. There weren’t a lot of Jews in that city, and so we did. My parents, though they were very religious, they were also very German.

Frankel: What do you mean by that?
KATZ: When I look back on their mannerisms and the way we lived, they were very German. This is the Rhineland where I grew up. The French troops were still there when I was a child, and I remember hearing about soon the French troops will leave. My father had fought in the First World War. He had an Iron Cross, and that was a big thing. He used to bring it out and show it to us. They were very proud of being German. I remember also when the French troops left, we were out on our balcony because we lived on the main street. They came down the main street, and we cheered that they were leaving. This was in 1932 or ’33.

Frankel: Were your parents involved politically?
KATZ: No, no.

Frankel; How about Jewishly, the Zionist movement?
KATZ: They were never. They were really somewhat anti-Zionist.

Frankel: In what sense, do you recall?
KATZ: I do remember hearing talk about, “Palestine is just a desert,” and, “Why would anybody want to go there?” On the other hand, my father’s dream always was that someday he would be able to pray at the Wall. It was a real dichotomy. On the one hand, they didn’t think that was a place one should go to, and they didn’t make any efforts about Zionism because they were German and they were happy where they were. But he did have a dream that someday he would take a trip and that he would be able to pray at the Wall. 

Frankel: Was he involved in the local Jewish community?
KATZ: Yes, he was involved.

Frankel: Did the synagogue have a rabbi?
KATZ: Yes, they had a rabbi.

Frankel: And who would teach you in the public school?
KATZ: It must have been an assistant. It wasn’t the rabbi; it was somebody else. It must have been the cantor.

Frankel: Was your brother bar mitzvah age by the time you left?
KATZ: My brother had studied for bar mitzvah, but had his bar mitzvah here, in Chicago.

Frankel: Would you say that your house, walking into the house, was a Jewish house? Could you tell?
KATZ: I don’t know whether you could tell other than the mezuzah on the door. I don’t know whether there were other things, other than that we kept kosher, but I don’t think there were any other symbols about. I think it was primarily a German household unless you really understood all the details in the kitchen.

Frankel: Were you active in any sports or other secular activities? Did you join any group?
KATZ: When I left I was nine and a half, so I really didn’t join anything. Oh, I went to dancing school after school, but I don’t remember doing anything else. My brother had piano lessons; he was the guy who played the grand piano. But other than that, I don’t think we were members of groups or anything like that. Neither were we members of any Jewish group but the synagogue. The synagogue was primarily a place where you prayed.

Frankel: Then, 1933, do you have any recollection of changes happening?
KATZ: I have this memory of walking down the street with Deda, and she saw a headline and said something about, “Oh my God, it’s going to be Hitler. It’s going to be absolutely terrible.” I remember that very well, that she said that. I also heard my parents talk about it and felt that things were not going well politically. But that’s all that I understood. Then later, things began to evolve.

Frankel: Before we move on to that, was there school on Saturday in Germany?
KATZ: Yes, there was school on Saturday, and I didn’t go. I had permission not to go.

Frankel: Do you recall any incidents with other …?
KATZ: No, there was never anything, not before 1933. There was never an incident.

Frankel: They just knew …?
KATZ: They just knew, or apparently my parents had arranged it. I used to bring a lesson home on Fridays, and I would do it on Sunday.

Frankel: So back to 1933. What are the earliest memories other than this incident …?
KATZ: I remember that my friends joined the Hitler-Jugend, the Hitler sort of Boy Scouts/Girl Scouts, and that I couldn’t join. That was the first thing. I remember feeling very badly about that, and that they were all getting to do this, making a big fuss about it and coming to school and talking about it. My parents said you can’t because they don’t take Jewish children. I sort of accepted that because I always knew, as long as I can remember, that I was somewhat different from everybody else, because Judaism was important in the household and none of these friends were Jewish. I sort of accepted that these things happened because I was Jewish. 

Then the first really bad thing that happened was that my brother came home one day, and he came in the house and he was bleeding. He had gotten a bad cut on the back of his head, and it turned out that some boys had chased him home from gymnasium, thrown rocks at him, and called him a dirty Jew. That was really the first bad thing that happened. I remember my parents being extremely upset, more upset than the two or three stitches that the whole incident had caused. Then slowly I remember there began to be talk about going to America.

Frankel: Do you remember anything else?
KATZ: Yes, I remember coming home from school one day and seeing Nazis, not in black shirts but regular Nazis in the yellow uniforms, parading in front of my father’s store. There were about five or six of them, and they were carrying placards that said, “Don’t trade in Jewish businesses.” That kind of harassment started about 1934 until the time that we left. It would just happen every once in a while. Of course, that was very distressing to everybody. 

I have two other memories. One of them is really very dramatic. I was a good swimmer when I was a child, very early, and so swimming was a big thing with me. We lived near the Rhine, just about two blocks away, and there was a place there where there was sort of a houseboat-like thing on the Rhine. It sort of held the river in and you could go swimming. It was like a swimming pool. It was the place where I had learned how to swim and the place where in the summertime I went almost every single day. 

It must have been the summer of ’35 when I had just become nine, or it might have been the summer before when I was eight. I don’t quite remember. I got to go by myself, which was a big deal, because often Deda would go with me, and I was beginning to get upset about that. But I got to go by myself, and when I got there, the man who took the tickets, who was someone I had always known — he was a veteran of the First World War, and he only had one arm, which was pretty typical in Germany in those days. People like that who had only one arm or leg would have these sort of low-level kinds of employment. When I came and he knew me, he said, “Suze, I can’t let you in. They won’t let Jews come into this pool anymore.” I can remember looking around at the opening and seeing my friends inside and realizing that I couldn’t go in. 

I turned around and walked back home again. My mother was home and Deda was there, and I told them what had happened. It was a moment when I realized that my mother was so upset. I’m upset now because I think of how upset my mother was, how upset you must be when you see your child come home and say, “I couldn’t go because I’m Jewish, or I’m black, or whatever.” I remember I realized how upset she was, and I remember trying to make her feel better, saying to her, “Well, you know what, maybe I’ll just swim in the bathtub” — which was absolutely ridiculous. But I really wanted to make her feel better. I could see that she was upset beyond the fact that I hadn’t been able to go swimming. I think it’s those little things that suddenly made me realize beyond my age how bad things really were.

The other incident — I was with some cousins in Mannheim. We were taking a walk. We had money and wanted to go into a restaurant, and almost every restaurant we passed had a sign on it that no Jews were allowed.

Frankel: You were aware what it meant?
KATZ: Yes. I was with older cousins and they certainly knew, but I could read it. I knew what it meant too.

Frankel: What was your response, your feeling?
KATZ: I think we were just upset. We came home and said we couldn’t spend our money, we couldn’t go buy a treat because we couldn’t get in. The grownups all had this same look, this look of horror.

Frankel: Do you remember changes with your neighbors, non-Jewish neighbors? Had you had good relationships?
KATZ: I think we’d had good relationships and I think my father continued to have good relationships. Obviously from what happened, my parents thought that though this was bad, it was temporary. The decision was finally made in my family that my brother and I would go to the relatives in America, but my parents would stay, and that we would just wait for it to pass. In 1935 laws were passed that we couldn’t go to school anymore, so that’s when there was really serious business going back and forth between the United States and my parents and the relatives in America. Making out papers for us.

Frankel: Who were those relatives in America?
KATZ: Those relatives were a sister of my father’s, who was a widow, and her four children, who were really much older, of another generation. My father, as I said, got married very late, and this was an older sister, so they were my cousins, but they were in their 30s and 40s. There were four of them; they were two brothers and two sisters. They had a household together in Chicago with their mother. They had each one come over slowly during the ’20s and finally sent for their mother. Those were the people who were making out the papers for us.

Frankel: Do you remember being part of the conversation with your parents when …?
KATZ: Yes, very much so. The letters would come, and there would be discussions about whether the visa was going to be ready and when we would be able to go. They had a lot of trouble because they were only cousins. My aunt was quite elderly.       My father was 55 by then, so she was well into her 60s and didn’t work, of course, so there were a lot of questions on the part of the State Department, whether cousins could bring us over and whether they could support us. I know they had a lot of trouble. I heard about some of it afterwards when we came. But I remember the letters going back and forth and my parents reading some of them aloud. 

Then when it looked like we were going to make it, there were letters of instruction about what kind of clothing we should bring. There was a letter about how boys in America don’t wear short pants; they wear knickers. At that time in the ‘30s American boys wore pants that were kind of down to here and then high socks. They sent a newspaper advertisement to show what the knickers looked like. My mother and Deda tried to emulate them from the picture and made two pairs. I remember when we got to Chicago they were the most awful-looking things. My brother wouldn’t wear them. 

There were other instructions about what we should bring along, and that the weather was very cold in the wintertime, things like that. And getting ready to go. I remember going to the consulate in Stuttgart and having to talk, having to be interviewed by myself at the age of nine by some hotshot in the consulate who kept on asking me when my birthday was. The typical bureaucratic thing — in case anybody was lying if you asked often enough, they might make a mistake. I remember doing that and getting some stamps on things, and my father being very pleased when it was all over with.

Frankel: Did you object, leaving your parents behind, do you recall?
KATZ: It took a little bit for me to understand what was really going to happen. The whole thing was looked upon as being temporary, and my parents went with us. We finally got the papers, everything got set, and we left in late December 1935. We went to Hamburg, and I remember that when we were ready to leave and the guards were going through our things, my mother and father were taken away from us by the officials. That was very frightening. Finally, about an hour later they came back. What I learned later was that they had done a complete strip search of both my mother and my father, but they hadn’t found anything. Actually, we did have some diamonds in the bottom of some cold cream jars, but they didn’t find those. My mother and father were very upset by that, but then we got on the boat and we came.

Frankel: You mentioned in 1935, referring to the laws, the Nuremberg laws? What other laws were you affected by in 1935?
KATZ: I think the only ones that I knew about were the facts that I couldn’t go to school anymore and that the servants had to leave. Sometime before we left, Deda had to leave, and the other servants had to leave because we couldn’t have them anymore.

Frankel: How did your servants respond after 1933 when things were beginning to happen?
KATZ: They stayed with us, and I think would have stayed with us forever. It sounds so corny, but they really were part of the family, and I think they were quite loyal to my parents. Deda used to complain because she couldn’t have a ham sandwich, and I remember my father saying, “Well, if you use some wax paper and just use the kitchen table in the afternoon when you aren’t cooking anything else, it’s all right to have a ham sandwich.” I also remember coming home from school, walking into the kitchen and being told, “Don’t come into the kitchen. We’re eating ham and your father will be upset.” They were really very loyal to my parents. She ended up being extremely loyal actually — Deda.

Frankel: When it was quite [inaudible] …
KATZ: We found out later that  — I want to tell this in sequence, but my parents never did come out. They died. My father died in camp. My mother died before that. Between 1936 and about 1940, first my mother and father, then my father, were living in just a room in Ludwigshafen. After the war, my brother found Deda, and we saw her again and spent a lot of time with her for many, many years. She had kept on visiting them, even when she really wasn’t supposed to visit Jews. She did keep on visiting them, and when it was hard for them to go to the store and buy something, she used to bring them groceries. So she really was very loyal.

Frankel: Let me clarify something. When I asked if you were upset leaving your parents behind, you said that they came with you …
KATZ: Yes. My parents came with us, and they brought us to Chicago.

Frankel: They came all the way to Chicago?
KATZ: They came all the way to Chicago. They had visitors’ visas. They came all the way to Chicago and stayed for about two months, or one month I guess it was, and then left. The idea was that they were leaving, and either things were going to get better, or my father would sell the business and he would also come to America. This was temporary. I remember feeling terribly lonesome and terribly upset. When we took them to the train station, I cried and cried and cried. But I never thought it was final, never.

Frankel: Did they have a choice of staying with you?
KATZ: No, I think at that point they had no choice; they did not have papers. It was very hard. The State Department was not very open to a large Jewish immigration. Even though there were a lot of German Jews who made it, there were a lot who didn’t, who tried. They only had a visitor’s visa, and they really couldn’t stay. They had no money. They hadn’t taken anything out with them. So at that point there was just no question, except for them to go back.

Frankel: When they went back, they went back to the big house?
KATZ: They went back to Ludwigshafen. They went back to the apartment. Then I think about 1938 they had to leave that apartment. My father had to give up the business. It was a forced sale.

Frankel: You also mentioned earlier you had two good friends. I assume they were not Jewish.
KATZ: They were not Jewish.

Frankel: Do you recall changes after ’33? Did they join the Hitler Youth?
KATZ: Yes, they joined, and that’s what first upset me. They joined and I didn’t. They still sort of played with me, but I think I sort of grew away from them. I think we all recognized that things were pretty unpleasant, and from spring through winter 1935, we stayed pretty much to ourselves.

Frankel: Do you recall changes in the teacher’s behavior towards the Jewish students after?
KATZ: I don’t recall anything happening to me. No. There were these external things like you can’t go to this place and you can’t go to that place, but personally, no one ever really mistreated me.

Frankel: You said that in 1935 the Jewish children were no longer allowed in the school. What did you do then?
KATZ: I’m not sure when the law became effective. I think I finished school in the spring of 1935 and then didn’t start again after the summer holiday. I didn’t start again and just sort of hung around until all the papers got fixed and we finally left in December.

Frankel: What about your brother?
KATZ: The same thing.

Frankel: Were there any Jewish schools set up?
KATZ: I think they were starting some Jewish schools. I know they started some Jewish schools. I think we just didn’t go because we were going to leave, so we just didn’t bother.

Frankel: Do you remember other relatives discussing the situation?
KATZ: Oh, yes. I can remember. I have this memory that this was the only discussion that went on for months and months and months with anybody who came to the house or any time you went with somebody else. One aunt and her child moved to Holland, sometime in 1935 already. One of my cousins who was in medical school, he’d been at Heidelberg and couldn’t go anymore, so he transferred to medical school in Paris. His mother and father — his father was my father’s brother — were making arrangements to live in France. They actually ended up in Italy. That’s what they did. So there was a lot of movement. Then there were Jewish friends who sat around and talked. One or two of them had come to America. We got letters. Somebody else went to Brazil. There was already a lot of movement, and lots and lots of talk. Lots of discussion.

Frankel: You said that your father had served in World War I. Did he feel that he would be safe, having been a loyal German?
KATZ: My father was like so many other German Jews. It was happening, and they couldn’t believe it was happening. I don’t remember him ever expressing something. He may have, but I don’t remember that. I don’t think he ever really believed how bad it was going to be. Nobody did.

Frankel: When you were ready to leave, did your parents just leave the servants in the house, or there were no longer servants?
KATZ: They weren’t there anymore. I think they just locked it up. Let’s see, there was a cousin who was kind of an adult. She was the daughter of my mother’s sister. She was working in Ludwigshafen, and she came to stay in the apartment. Isn’t that funny? I had forgotten that she did. She stayed and took care of the apartment, and I think the manager of the store kept on managing the store. My father arranged that, and they just went. We left in late December, and my parents left the beginning of February. They went back. So they weren’t in Chicago that long.

Frankel: They left together with you or arrived later?
KATZ: No, they left with us. They brought us to Chicago, they stayed for about three or four weeks, and then they left. I remember taking them to the train station.

Frankel: Had you studied English before in preparation?
KATZ: No. 

Frankel: What do you recall from the trip itself?
KATZ: I recall that I had an absolutely wonderful time on the boat. It was an American ship, and my brother and I ran around and had a wonderful time. We got to eat ice cream. This whole thing is so horrible, but children are children. I just remember having fun on that boat and eating a lot of ice cream, and being amazed that Americans drank water with ice in it and that they drank orange juice in the morning first thing. I had always been told that having any fruit on an empty stomach would absolutely kill you. They brought grapefruit to them and they ate it. We couldn’t believe it. That’s kind of what I remember about the boat, very childish things.

Frankel: From Ludwigshafen you went to Hamburg?
KATZ: Yes, we took the train to Bremen, left from Bremerhaven and came to New York, and had some distant cousins in New York who met us. I think we stayed overnight at their apartment for two nights, and then we got on the train and went to Chicago. Then the relatives met us at the train station.

Frankel: From your hometown to the harbor you had no trouble?
KATZ: No, there was no trouble. Now I don’t know what kind of problems my parents may have had in arranging this, but the only trouble I remember is the thing that happened as we were leaving and going through immigration. I do remember that was pretty dramatic, but I don’t remember anything else.

Frankel: Do you remember saying goodbye to anyone in particular before leaving, non-Jewish friends or …?
KATZ: I may have said goodbye to my friends. The only really sad goodbye I remember is that Deda came down to the train station. I can remember waving to her, and her sort of running after the train and crying. And saying goodbye to my relatives, I can remember that. I think I had pretty well distanced myself from the friends that I had.

Frankel: So your arrival from New York to Chicago. Can you tell us anything?
KATZ: I can recall that, yes. First of all, I can remember the train because we slept in berths overnight. I had never done that before. I thought that was pretty exciting. Then I remember coming to Chicago. It was interesting. As you came into Chicago there was a very small station that the train always stopped at from New York, which was close to where my relatives lived. You could get off there, and if you were going to go to New York, or if you were coming back, you would get off at that station rather than get off at the huge downtown Chicago station. We had been told that we would be getting off at this station, and there was a porter there who told us the station was coming up, as well as he could because none of us spoke English. None of us did. I remember getting off the train, and I can remember these five people huddled in fur coats because it was very cold in Chicago. 

Frankel: Who were the five?
KATZ: The five people were my aunt and her four children, my cousins. I remember them sort of huddling on the platform because it was so bitter cold, waiting for us. I can remember my father seeing his sister, hugging her and crying. I felt that was very unusual because I had never seen my father cry before. Then we were just in their apartment. They had a very small apartment, and there were all of a sudden four extra people. People were sleeping everywhere. There had been a plan originally — my brother was 13 on February 28, and the family in Chicago had arranged that he would have his bar mitzvah at the temple there. My father felt he had to go back, and originally my mother was going to stay for the bar mitzvah and then go back by herself. 

This is one of these sharp childhood memories. Because the apartment was so crowded, I was sleeping in the same bedroom with my parents. I remember waking up in the middle of the night, and both my mother and father were sitting at the edge of the bed. My father had his arm around my mother, and my mother was crying. I asked what was the matter. My father and mother told me that she really wanted to stay for the bar mitzvah, but that she was very frightened about going back by herself and that she didn’t want to do that. That night they must have made the decision that she would go back with him and that she wouldn’t be there for the bar mitzvah. I can remember that. They left about two weeks before the bar mitzvah.

Frankel: Do you remember then exchanges of letters?
KATZ: With my parents? Yes. Lots and lots of letters back and forth. Then what happened was my mother, who’d had breast cancer in about 1933 when she found the first lump — she had a mastectomy; she had radium treatments — her cancer came back after she came back from Chicago that time. She died of cancer in 1938. Then there was just my father.

Frankel: When they would write, would they describe the situation changes?
KATZ: They did. We knew that they’d had to leave the apartment and we knew that he’d had to do a forced sale on the business. We knew that they were living in a room. We knew that my mother was mortally ill. We knew when she died. They sent a telegram. We knew what was going on. In the meantime, there were people who were coming from that part of Germany who knew my father. He always gave the address and telephone number. They would always come and tell us how things were and how bad things were.

Frankel: Were there any attempts for him to try and come over?
KATZ: That’s a long, sad story. My father, I don’t know how hard he pushed about coming, and I don’t know how hard the relatives tried to get visas for him. It’s always been kind of a mystery to me that it just never quite came off. In the meantime, their mother died — my father’s sister. But my brother and I stayed with them, and they took very good care of us and loved us a great deal. They were very strange people. They were two sisters and two brothers, and they lived together. Nobody had ever been married. I just don’t know what they did about my father. The horrible part of the story is that my father wrote and said, as I understand it, that he wasn’t sure about whether he really wanted to come and stay, but he really wanted to see us, and could they at least manage a visitor’s visa for him? And so they did.

In the spring of 1939 my father came, right before I was 13 years old. He came to Chicago to visit. It was a horrible, sad, and poignant thing. He was so sad and so broken with my mother’s death and the things that were happening. Also, my brother and I had become very Americanized. It doesn’t take children very long, and we must have seemed somewhat strange to him. In retrospect, I realize that. I didn’t, of course, at the time. 

My relatives were not encouraging about having him stay at all. In their defense, I have to say that they just really didn’t realize how bad things were, and that he was so broken that he, I don’t think, imagined that he could come and stay and have any kind of a life at that point. And a lot of relatives were still back in Germany, and they kind of looked to him, although he was so broken that he really couldn’t take on that leadership role that he had always had in the family, but I think they still looked to him for that. So he came for about six weeks, and it was a sad visit. And he left. That was that. Who knows whose fault it was? Or maybe it was nobody’s fault; it was the situation.

Frankel: That was in the spring of 1939?
KATZ: Yes, right before the war started.

Frankel: And was it on an American passenger ship still?
KATZ: Yes, back and forth. By himself. He went back. There were other people who had visitor’s visas who — there was a trick you could do. You could go into Canada and fix up your papers. There were all kinds of things you could do. He didn’t do any of them.

Frankel: He chose to go back?
KATZ: He chose to go back. I think he saw us, he saw we were OK, and he chose to go back.

Frankel: Now where was he living at the time?
KATZ: He was still in Ludwigshafen.

Frankel: But in a small ….
KATZ: In a small room, and another cousin was staying there with him.

Frankel: He had been forced to sell his business?
KATZ: Yes.

Frankel: How was he able to live?
KATZ: I have absolutely no idea. I’ve never been able to figure that out, how he had enough money to come and go back. I really don’t understand. I think he had money saved. He got money from the business. He lived frugally, and he was able to manage.

Frankel: Do you remember him writing anything after Kristallnacht?
KATZ: Remember him writing what?

Frankel: After Kristallnacht, do you …?
KATZ: After Kristallnacht? I don’t remember him writing about Kristallnacht. I remember him telling me about it, though, when he came in 1939. Well, now wait a minute. He wasn’t — yes, I guess they didn’t leave that apartment until ’38 because he did tell me about Kristallnacht and that all the dishes had gotten broken. I guess they were still in the apartment when my mother died, and he was living in that room afterwards, after Kristallnacht, because I do remember him telling about what had happened, and that all the dishes had gotten broken.

Frankel: What else did he say?
KATZ: I think mostly that, and that he knew one of the guys who came in and had been so shocked because it was somebody who he had done business with. He still didn’t believe; he still didn’t, because I remember him telling me that.

Frankel: Your mother was still alive?
KATZ: No, my mother was dead by then.

Frankel: Did he say anything else after? The city, what had happened?
KATZ: No, he really didn’t tell me. What he told the relatives, I don’t know. They didn’t tell me. He talked about my mother’s death and how much he missed her. I remember he talked about Kristallnacht, and he talked about that he was going to go back and make sure that everyone else was OK, and then he would come.

Frankel: What do you remember doing with him when he was visiting in ’39?
KATZ: I remember we talked a lot and went for walks. We may have done a little sightseeing, I really don’t remember. It was a very uncomfortable visit because there was a terrible tension between him and my relatives, and I sensed that, and my brother knew it. My brother and I talked about it too. By that time I was 13 and he was 16; we weren’t babies anymore. We had done some fast growing up, so we knew that there was a lot of tension going on. It was just an uncomfortable visit. They were quite ungenerous with him, though by that time they were making a good living. They had a good going business, and we lived in a fairly comfortable apartment. There was plenty of room for him. They said that there wasn’t room, and they put him up in a hotel about three blocks away. That was a terrible thing to do.

Frankel: Did he say anything about having to wear a Star of David?
KATZ: He didn’t mention that — to us, anyway. He did not tell us how bad it was. I think he didn’t want to make us feel bad. What he told them, I don’t know. What they heard, I don’t know. I don’t think they wanted to hear anything. They were very possessive of us. Especially me. That was sometimes nice and sometimes a burden, and I knew that. In some ways, they were unconsciously not nice to him. They didn’t want him to come because they didn’t want to lose me. I would have to go live with him. I think that was part of what was going on. Human beings always behave the way human beings do, no matter what.

Frankel: Did you and your brother try and find out in the news what was going on in Germany?
KATZ: Yes, we tried to find things out. We knew that it was bad, that it was worse than what he had told us. Then, this was quite some time later, in 1941, we found out that all the Jews that were left in Baden, in that area, were all taken to Gurs, which was a concentration camp — I’m sure you know about that — in France. We knew about that because that was pretty well known. There was a newspaper for the German refugees called the Aufbau, and we read that, my brother and I. I think the whole family did. That was in the Aufbau. People knew that all the Jews had been picked up, so we knew that my father and the aunts, uncles, and cousins that were left, we knew they had been picked up and had been taken to Gurs. Then we actually got some letters from Gurs, from my father. Yes, for a short time we did.

Frankel: Do you recall the letters after his return in ’39?
KATZ: The letters that we got after he went back? I do, but I don’t remember them being informative particularly. They were just letters: “I hope you’re fine. I hope you’re studying.” Typical father letters. He didn’t complain.

Frankel: There was no problem getting those letters through?
KATZ: No, there wasn’t. We got letters. It’s surprising when I think about it now, but we got letters. We even got a couple of letters from Gurs.

Frankel: Did you also correspond with your governess after you had come here?
KATZ: For a short while, and then we didn’t correspond anymore. That just sort of faltered, or whether she stopped writing or whether she maybe asked us not to write anymore. She was working for another family, and it may not have been a very good idea for her to be getting letters from America. But I know we stopped writing to her.

Frankel: What else did you hear after your father had been interned in Gurs? What happened next?
KATZ: We knew that the other aunts and uncles were there, and that’s really all we knew. Some people were able to get out of Gurs and still leave, as late as 1941, I guess. I think maybe even as late as 1942. I don’t know. Because then somebody came to Chicago who had been in Gurs and looked us up and told us that my father had died in Gurs during the typhoid epidemic, and that all he knew was that my father died and that these other aunts and uncles that we knew and their child were still in Gurs. Then we never knew anything more until the war was over.

Frankel: Do you remember what your reaction was, hearing that news?
KATZ: That my father was dead? I was very sad, and I really felt angry at my relatives because I felt they could have prevented it. But on the other hand, they had gotten stuck with us and had taken care of us. I never expressed it to them ever, I never did, because some of what they did, I don’t think they even knew what they were doing. They didn’t know what an awful thing they did. Then, after my father died, I think they just had lots of rationales about why it happened.

Frankel: Did they speak German?
KATZ: No, except for their mother. We would speak German with her. But then she died, and there was a real effort to make English the home language, so that my brother and I would speak good English. As you can hear, I don’t have an accent as a result of that. Yes, and my German is very bad.

Frankel: Tell us something about your integration in American society.
KATZ: I remember being taken off to a neighborhood school three or four days after we arrived. We were one of the first refugee children who came, and so the school at that point had no policy. Later on, in that particular neighborhood in Chicago there were lots of German-Jewish kids, and I think the school worked up some sort of program for them. But we were the first ones. It wasn’t that Chicago wasn’t used to having immigrant kids come into school. The principal’s name was Miss Mulroy, and she decided that my brother and I should go to first grade. That would be the best way to learn the language because they did so many language things. It was pretty embarrassing for me. I was going on 10. But my brother was about to be 13, and that was really ridiculous. He sat around for about a week or two, and I think even Miss Mulroy realized how foolish it all was [laughs]. So they kind of moved him on, and I stayed in first grade a little bit longer, and then finally went to second and to third. By summertime I was speaking English and playing with all the kids.

I just remember the first week or two being very uncomfortable, and not being able to understand anything. I remember a teacher getting upset with me one day and screaming at me in English, and I thought, “How stupid. This lady knows that I don’t understand a word she says” [laughs]. I could tell she was angry because I had marked something where I shouldn’t have marked it. But it was easy. It wasn’t that difficult. It was total immersion, and I did it.

Frankel: Do you have any memories of the schoolmates?
KATZ: I had a particular friend, and as a matter of fact, she’s still my friend and she lives in Portland, Oregon. She lived in the same apartment building. She was different. Other kids just looked at us because we were different and we had funny clothes on. They weren’t very interested. But she was really bright and saw that this was a great opportunity for her, and she took me under her wing. She was very clever at communicating with me. We still joke to this day about how she taught me English, and she really did. I don’t quite remember what my brother did; he didn’t have a friend right away, but he learned English really quickly too. It didn’t take long.

Frankel: Did your parents send lots of stuff with you besides clothing?
KATZ: Like a trousseau. Yes. There were linens. My father paid somebody’s passage who came over through the Portuguese route and brought silverware. I still have it, and a silver candelabra. I had lots of linens. Both my brother and I did. Blankets, and some oriental rugs. A grand piano came about two years after it was sent, but it did arrive. It actually arrived in Chicago.

Frankel: So their intention was maybe to follow you?
KATZ: On the one hand, he thought it was temporary. On the other hand, he sent all the stuff. I think part of that was because he couldn’t take any money out; that was also payment to the family.

Frankel: Were your relatives in Chicago religious? Did you continue?
KATZ: They had also been brought up quite religious, and the household was kosher when their mother was still alive, but they had elected to go to a temple rather than a synagogue, and that was Reform. They were uncomfortable in the Conservative synagogue because it was very different. It was mostly Eastern European Jews, and their way of worship and so forth was different, so they became Reform, which was also different. But it was easier to take because everybody in the Reform temple was German. And so we went to the Sunday School at the Reform temple, and my brother was bar mitzvahed in the Reform temple.

Frankel: Do you have any memories of the bar mitzvah?
KATZ: Yes, I do. I remember the bar mitzvah very well because everybody was so impressed with this little German boy who did so well. He couldn’t do anything in English, but his Hebrew was very, very good. It was a Reform temple where most people did not bother having their children bar mitzvahed. Most of them didn’t really have any real knowledge of Hebrew.

Frankel: What do you recall of the bar mitzvah?
KATZ: I just remember him doing his thing, and afterwards, lots of people in the temple spoke German, so they came up and talked to my brother and told him what a wonderful job he did. Then there was a little party at the apartment.

Frankel: So he had been trained in Germany?
KATZ: He had trained in Germany for his bar mitzvah, yes.

Frankel: And the date had been set?
KATZ: The date had been arranged by the relatives in Chicago for the Saturday after his 13th birthday. That had been arranged. It was very important to my father. I think he would have not come if he hadn’t been sure that it could be arranged. He wouldn’t have sent us; he would have waited until after the bar mitzvah.

Frankel: Were you involved in any activities outside of school, growing up in Chicago?
KATZ: I took dancing lessons again for a while, and my brother took piano lessons for a while. Kids didn’t do things as formally as they do now. I had lots of chores to do when I came home. I did all the mending in the family. This was the Depression, and the family, when we first came, was really not doing very well financially, and everybody was working. It was the kind of situation where everybody pitched in. It was the first time I ever had to do anything, but I’d learned how to sew when I was little because in Germany you learned how to sew in school. I knew how to darn socks. That was my job. I darned socks. After all, there were five adults in the family and two kids, so there were lots of socks to darn. I had other cleanup chores to do and stuff. Then I made friends easily and played with the kids.

Frankel: Jewish friends?
KATZ: In that neighborhood, yes. I had many more Jewish friends in America than I ever had in Germany because we lived in Chicago in Hyde Park, which was a very Jewish neighborhood. There were lots of buildings where there were only Jews and lots of apartment buildings where there were no Jews. People lived together in a friendly way, but there was an understanding about where Jews lived and where non-Jews lived. All the schools I went to were predominantly more Jewish kids than non-Jewish kids.

Frankel: Did you and your brother ever talk about wanting to go back to Germany with your parents, or do you have any memories of …?
KATZ: No, I think we talked about our parents coming, but we did not want to go back. We liked America; we adjusted to it easily. We understood what was going on, and we did not want to go back.

Frankel: Tell us a little bit about the household; it must have been indeed unusual. Four adults, brothers, siblings?
KATZ: [Laughs.] It was a very unusual household. There were two brothers and two sisters. When we came they ranged in ages from about 32 to 42 — and their mother, who was a very strong woman. I think that’s why nobody ever got married. They had just bought a business together. They were running a small grocery and butcher shop, and everybody worked. Everybody came home tired. The two men were lots of fun. They were fun guys to be with. It was fun for my brother and I. Younger than my father had been, and more willing to play around with us and things like that. 

The two women were both, I recognize now, very neurotic, very needy. My brother and I met a lot of their needs, which I didn’t realize until I became an adult. I was always guilty about the fact that they had to take care of me, but when I became an adult I realized that it had been very much a two-way street. We met each other’s needs. They were very demanding of my time and things that I did. I didn’t have as much freedom as a lot of the other kids, but I also learned how to get around that. As life went on, their business was very successful. They opened up another store and they became very involved in the business, but they were also financially well off. As a result of that, when I got to be 18 I was able to go off to college, to the University of Wisconsin, and not have to worry about money. They paid for everything and so on. I looked upon them as parents, as parental figures.

Frankel: After your father died, did they adopt you?
KATZ: No, there was never anything legal, ever.

Frankel: So who really took care of you since they were all working in the business?
KATZ: I don’t think anybody really took care of me. I grew up like Topsy. They were all in business and I went off to school, and that was about it. And I came home.

Frankel: Was anybody there?
KATZ: The first two years my aunt was there. Then afterwards, they would always have a maid who took care of the house. For a while I used to come home for lunch, and the maid would give me lunch. But they weren’t ever around until late in the evening and on Saturdays and Sundays.

Frankel: Were they involved in the Jewish community? Active?
KATZ: No, not really. They were workaholics. They really did nothing else but work. They really didn’t. They didn’t have a social life, not really.

Frankel: What about services? Did they take you?
KATZ: I shouldn’t say that. The men had a social life, but the women didn’t.

Frankel: Can you elaborate on that?
KATZ: One of the things is that the men had girlfriends, which was something that my brother and I discovered. It was so much fun for us to secretly know about this [laughs]. My brother was the lucky one because he sometimes got to go to the baseball game with them, and they would take their girlfriends to the baseball game, and he would come home and — my brother and I obviously became very close under these circumstances because we were these two waifs that got left in this strange household — so he would come home and he would gossip with me about the girlfriends and what they looked like and whether they were nice or not nice. They would never tell the women about it because the women were so jealous that their brothers had girlfriends. So that was kept a secret. We understood this. So they had a social life, but the women really didn’t.

Frankel: Did you do anything for fun ever?
KATZ: Oh, yes. I had a good time. I knew how to do it. They weren’t ungenerous in the sense that they didn’t want me to spend time with friends. It was just that my time was more limited with friends than my girlfriends. But I had fun with friends and played with them, and when I got to be older I was a typical teenager and went out on dates and did all those things that other kids did.

Frankel: Did they celebrate the Jewish holidays?
KATZ: They celebrated the Jewish holidays, but after their mother died they were never that religious. They went to a Reform temple, and you went in the morning on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. We never had Christmas; we had Hanukkah. And we always had a Seder.

Frankel: So that was the extent of the family since they never got married?
KATZ: That was the family. I think they had some friends who sometimes would come over. They had one sister who was married, also in Chicago. They would always come for the Seder.

Frankel: Now when your brother graduated from high school, what happened to him? Did he leave then?
KATZ: My brother graduated from high school, and he started to work and go to school part time. Then he was drafted.

Frankel: What year was that?
KATZ: It was 1942. I graduated high school in 1943, so he must have graduated in 1940, then he was working and sort of going to evening school, and then he was drafted. Neither one of us were citizens. We didn’t come with our parents. Our status was as immigrants, as legal immigrants, but we could not become citizens until we were 21 and did our own personal declaration. So my brother was drafted, and he went off somewhere and they made him a citizen, but I remained a non-citizen, and actually all during the war I was considered an enemy alien, which is really ironic.

Frankel: Were there any practical effects?
KATZ: I had to go and register. I had to swear that I wouldn’t have a camera and I wouldn’t have any binoculars and that I would let the FBI know whenever I moved. At some point I started college, and I remember sending a postcard saying I’m moving to Madison, Wisconsin. At the end of the year I would send a postcard saying I’m moving back to Chicago. I don’t imagine that anybody at FBI headquarters ever looked at that. Nobody every checked up on whether I had a camera or binoculars. I just thought it was ironic. They needed my brother in the army, so he became a citizen.

Frankel: They drafted him before he became a citizen?
KATZ: That’s right. He was drafted when he was 18.

Frankel: Where was he stationed? Did he go abroad?
KATZ: Oh, yes. That’s rather a long story. He was first stationed in Chicago. Somewhere near Chicago he became a citizen. Everybody took tests in the army to decide what you were good for. My brother is very bright, so he tested high, and because he was bilingual they decided that he must be good at languages, so they sent him off to the University of Indiana for one year to do a total immersion study in Turkish. I don’t know why, but that’s what he did. He spent a year in Bloomington, which was very near Chicago, so I used to go visit him a lot. Then after that he was sent to Washington, DC and was trained in a camp in Maryland where they train people for, what did they call it at that time? “Spy network.” OSS, I guess it was [Office of Strategic Services]. Yes.

Frankel: It preceded the CIA?
KATZ: Yes. He was trained there and sort of got his German retrained. So he went off in the army, and by the time he left he was a sergeant and he was assigned to an infantry group. He fought in France. By the time he went, D-Day had already occurred, and so he fought in France and would interrogate prisoners and do translations and so on. Then he got a field commission and became a lieutenant. He was in the army during the occupation also, and that’s when he found Deda once again. He was stationed in the part of Germany where we had come from, and he started searching for her. Tonight I was thinking as I was coming over here that he may have told me once, but I’ve forgotten exactly what he did to find her. But he did. At that point, he once again established a relationship with her, and I did too by writing to her, and later on I saw her many times.

Frankel: Did he go back to Ludwigshafen?
KATZ: Did I go back?

Frankel: Did he go back when he was stationed in Germany after the war?
KATZ: Yes.

Frankel: To your hometown? Was the house still standing, the apartment?
KATZ: Yes, he went back. It had been very [inaudible word]. The IG Farben plant was there, and so it was just flat and there was nothing. I remember his writing and saying the only thing that’s left is the door with the address. He knew it was it because it had the address on it. Our address was zehn [ten] Ludwigstrasse, and he said the ten was still up on the door. I went back in 1949, which was really still pretty early, and went to Ludwigshafen, and the door was still standing there with the ten on it. It hadn’t been cleaned up yet. In 1949 they just kind of had pushed the rubble to the side. Nothing had been rebuilt yet.

Frankel: Were there other relatives who had stayed behind in Germany?
KATZ: What happened was that everybody went to Gurs. My father died there, and the other people ended up on transports to Auschwitz. I don’t think we really knew exactly what happened to them until after the war was over. Since then I’ve been at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, where I saw their names on the lists on the transports. My brother and I went about two years ago, and so we know what happened to everybody exactly. But there was a miracle that happened also.

That was that my mother’s brother and his wife had two children, my two cousins. One of them was a boy whose name was Gunther, and he came to Chicago, also without his parents, through the Jewish Home Finding Society, about a year and a half after we did. He lived with a foster family, but he also used to spend a lot of time with us. He had a little brother, but the little brother was ten years younger than he was and so he couldn’t come by himself. That little brother went to Gurs with his parents, and we assumed afterwards that he had ended up in Auschwitz, but while this cousin was in the army, also in the occupation in Germany, the Red Cross found him and said, “We have found your little brother.” 

The American Friends Service Committee had been allowed to take a certain number of children out of Gurs, and they got the kids into Switzerland. There were Swiss families who became foster parents of these Jewish children, and the kids were there all during the war. This little guy was six years old when his mother managed to get him into this program with the American Friends Service Committee. The kids ran through the woods, and the Swiss were waiting on the other side. So he stayed in Davos [?] for three years, but pinned to his shirt was the address of my relatives and the address of his brother. When the war was over, the group in Germany, or whoever, through the Red Cross found his brother. Then he subsequently came to the United States. He was ten by the time he came to the United States, and that same family brought him up.

Frankel: The foster family?
KATZ: No, my family. They were his relatives too. The two sisters. The brothers in the meantime along the way got married, but the two sisters took him in when he was ten.

Frankel: You had left by then?
KATZ: I was in college when he came.

Frankel: Back to you, when you graduated from high school you went to Madison, Wisconsin.
KATZ: Yes.

Frankel: And you would come home …?
KATZ: I would come home on vacations and on weekends.

Frankel: And then when did you become a citizen?
KATZ: When I was 21. Finally, when I was 18, I legally had to go to the county courthouse — I guess it was; I don’t remember where — and make my declaration of citizenship. Then when I was 21, I filled out the appropriate papers and finally became a citizen. I think I had already graduated from college when I finally became a citizen.

Frankel: After graduation, what happened after college?
KATZ: I got married. I met my husband at the University of Wisconsin, but he was also from Chicago. We got married in 1948, about two months after I graduated. We lived in Chicago for a while, and then we got jobs in Switzerland through the State Department. We lived in Switzerland, and that’s when I started going back to Germany. The first time I ever went back was in 1949. My interest was primarily to see Deda. That’s when I kind of re-established a relationship with her. I think that’s why I remember things so well, because I saw her again. I was 22 then. I saw her in 1949, so it had been about 13 years since I had seen her. In talking with her, she brought back a lot of memories. She would say, “Do you remember this? Do you remember when we used do this and used to do that?” So that’s why my memories are sharper than one would expect under the circumstances. It was through my relationship with her. 

Frankel: When you left for the United States, what did you choose to take with you? In other words, toys …?
KATZ: When I left? I remember I took some books with me and some junk jewelry that I thought was beautiful. I think I had pretty much stopped playing with dolls, so I don’t remember taking any toys. I think it was just books, clothes, and some jewelry. Maybe I had some mementos, but I don’t remember them at all. 

Oh, I know! How could I forget this? I had gotten for my sixth birthday a set of beautiful China for playing tea party, and Deda insisted that I bring that along. I remember bringing it to Chicago and my relatives saying, “You’re much too old to play with this.” I said that yes, I was, and it went into a box. When I got married, I went through all these boxes and said, “Here are all these dishes. Maybe I’ll have a daughter some day.” So I took the dishes with me, and I did have a daughter. I gave them to her and she played with them, and she has had them in her house because she was waiting to give them to her daughter, but she has two boys [laughs]. As a matter of fact, about two weeks ago, her niece, her brother’s child in Minneapolis, was seven years old. She was there for her birthday, and she brought her the dishes. So the third generation has the dishes. My granddaughter has them. That’s the only thing I can remember bringing.

Frankel: How about photographs?
KATZ: I do have some photographs, yes. I did bring some. I have a little book that my mother and Deda put together of me, but they’re very bad pictures. You can’t even tell who it is. But I did have photographs. Yes. And photographs of my parents. 

Frankel: What did you major in that you were both working for the State Department?
KATZ: Absolutely nothing to do with what we majored in; we were just lucky. I majored in sociology and my husband majored in economics. What happened was we decided to go to Europe for the summer and see if we could find jobs because the Marshall Plan was going and lots of people were getting jobs. We ended up getting a job in Switzerland with the State Department, and the concern that we worked for was sort of a substitute for a German legation and did all the work about people traveling and doing business because Germany, of course, was still occupied then. And people were doing business with Germany. So we both worked in the office there.

Frankel: Your German was still good?
KATZ: Yes. As a matter of fact, I got the job because I spoke German. The person who interviewed me was an American who didn’t speak very good German, so he thought it was pretty adequate. My German was really not very good, but it was good enough for that, and it got better after I took the job.

Frankel: And what about your husband? Is he American born?
KATZ: Yes, he’s American born. His mother and father are both from Russia, but he’s American born.

Frankel: So what was his position in the State Department? What was his job?
KATZ: Actually, we got the job because of me, and at first he was just doing some crummy office work, but then the representative in that particular place who was representing the CIA left, and Mike got cleared through Washington, so he did that job for a while. That sounds very romantic, but mostly what he did was work with lists of bad people and good people. It was an office job primarily. We stayed there for about two years, and then we left and went back home again.

Frankel: Did you travel much during …?
KATZ: We traveled a lot during that time. We traveled first for three months before we got the job, then we got the job and did a lot of traveling. Then after we quit, we’d saved enough money, we bought a car and traveled some more. 

Frankel: Did you go back to Chicago?
KATZ: We went back to Chicago for a short time and hated it, after having lived in Switzerland. My husband had once come on a trip to the northwest and he said, “Let’s go and see if we can find anything.” We decided we would go to Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco, and see if we could find jobs and see what was going on. We knew some people here in Portland, so we stopped here first, and Mike got a job right away. We’ve been here ever since. That was 1951.

Frankel: In what field?
KATZ: As an economist. He worked for Bonneville Power Administration.

Frankel: And you mentioned the daughter and the son?
KATZ: Yes, I have a son who was born in 1953 and a daughter who was born in 1956. 

Frankel: Do they live …?
KATZ: My daughter lives here. As a matter of fact, she lives kind of a stone’s throw behind here. My son lives in Minneapolis.

Frankel: What about your brother?
KATZ: My brother, interestingly enough, made a career out of the army. He was discharged, of course, after the war, in about ’46, but he stayed in the reserves and was called back during the Korean War. His reserve unit was called, and he was called back. By the time that war was over and he was ready to go home, he was a major, and he realized that the army was really a good career and that he was quite successful in it. So he stayed in the army, and he ended up being a two-star general. He’s retired now and lives in Arizona.

Frankel: Did he ever get married?
KATZ: Yes. He got married, and he has three children and one grandson.

Frankel: Before we conclude, Ron, do you want to ask any questions?

Applebaum: Yes. You said that you found out that your father had died in Gurs, from somebody who was there and had gotten out.
KATZ: It was something like that. I’m pretty sure that’s how we originally found out.

Applebaum: He got out during the war?
KATZ: Yes, people did. People got out of Gurs during the war, and people would go to Portugal and take boats from Lisbon. It was dangerous, you know, but if you made it, you made it. And they came.

Frankel: Gurs was in France.
KATZ: Yes, Gurs was in France. Theoretically, it was in unoccupied France, but they were holding German Jews. As a matter of fact, there’s a history of the Gurs camp. Are you familiar with that?

Frankel: Yes. I’ve heard about it, but I haven’t seen it.
KATZ: Yes, someone once gave me the book and it’s in German, so it was not that easy for me to read. But there’s some letters in that book between the French commandant of the camp to the German headquarters, which had told him that he had to take the Jews in. There are letters of complaint in there about, “You said that these people were only going to stay for a while, and it’s costing us a lot of money, and we don’t have enough food. We have this terrible typhoid epidemic, and what are you going to do about it?” Pushing the Germans to do something. Well, the Germans finally did. They took everybody to Auschwitz. I don’t think that was the commandant’s intention. But it wasn’t a horrible concentration camp; it was just an awful place to be. People were in a camp and they didn’t control the diseases very well, and it was uncomfortable, but it wasn’t anything like Dachau or Auschwitz or anything like that.

Applebaum: If ten or 20 years down the road, somebody’s going to be watching this video who hasn’t been involved in the war, a high school student studying about it, do you have any words of wisdom that you can relay to those people?
KATZ: I think that what happened in Germany can happen anywhere. I really do. I think it can. Wherever people are so desperate to be comfortable and to be led and not have to worry about themselves, so that somebody comes along and says, “I’ll do it for you.” It can happen. It happens almost without your knowing it, and when you finally find out, it’s too late. I know there must have been people who at some point thought, “My God, what’s going on is horrible.” But by that time it was too late because if you did something to resist, you ended up in prison or you ended up dead. So my message to people always is to stay politically active, to understand what’s going on, to take part in your community, and see that things like that don’t happen. That’s the lesson of the Holocaust.

Frankel: Are the two brothers and sisters still alive?
KATZ: No, they’re not.

Frankel: Do you have any of the letters that your father sent, that your parents …?
KATZ: No, I don’t have any letters. I don’t know whatever happened to them. I don’t have anything. I have some pictures, and that’s all. Nothing else.

Frankel: When you went back, and you and your brother contacted Deda, had your parents given her anything when they had to move out of the apartment? Or before he went to Gurs, was he able to …?
KATZ: No, nothing. She didn’t have anything, nothing at all. No. Other than the things that he sent, that he managed to get out, there was nothing. 

Frankel: So maybe we can look at the photographs now.
KATZ: OK. I don’t have a lot.

KATZ: This was my first day of school, and it was the custom in Germany to give children this — I can’t even remember what it’s called anymore, a tüte or something like that [Schultüte] — and it’s filled with candy. It was just a custom that on the first day of school you got this and you had lots of pictures taken.

Frankel: The teacher gives this to you?
KATZ: No, your parents give it to you. 

Frankel: You go to school with it, or after …?
KATZ: I really don’t remember. I think you got it afterwards. You had pictures taken, and then you got to eat it. It was sort of a little bit like Halloween. I have this picture, and then I have ….

Frankel: Before we move on, do you recall where are you standing in this picture?
KATZ: Yes, I’m standing in front of the school.

KATZ: This is the same scene, but it’s with my brother in the same place. You can see the hat that he has on. That’s his school hat from his gymnasium. 

Then I have one more picture of my brother and myself. This is the two of us on a summer day. I don’t know what year it is, maybe the summer of ’34, and we’re sitting out on our balcony on a sunny day.

Frankel: Did your family take trips in Germany?
KATZ: Yes, we did sometimes. I remember going once up to an island in the North Sea called Norderney, and we went to the Schwarzwald several times, but most of the summer visits were to the relatives in the small towns, the two towns where my relatives lived. That’s mostly what we did.

KATZ: This is a picture of my mother and father, and my brother and myself. I always thought it was taken on the boat, but obviously it isn’t taken on the boat. It was taken in Germany, and it must have been taken right before we left.

Frankel: In Hamburg possibly?
KATZ: It may have been taken in Hamburg, or it may have been taken in Ludwigshafen before we left, but I know that was the last picture that I have of the four of us. From the clothes, I know that was my fancy dress that I was taking to America with me.

KATZ: This is my kinderausweis, which is sort of my passport that I had when I left. It has all of these official stamps on it, that I could leave and that I could go to America. So that’s what I looked like when we left.

Frankel: Are there any symbols on that card indicating that the Nazis were in power?
KATZ: That’s interesting, because there’s no Hakenkreuz, swastika on here.

Frankel: Or an eagle?
KATZ: It’s not on there.

Frankel: Any indication that you are Jewish?
KATZ: No, it’s just a police card. Nothing.

Frankel: And you received it just to leave?
KATZ: Just to leave; it’s an immigration card. I don’t have my American visa. This is an immigration card for the police.

KATZ: This is a picture of my brother and myself and my father in 1939 when he came to visit us. This is the one picture I was able to find from that visit. 

This is the alien registration card that I had to have during the war because I wasn’t an American citizen. The United States government still considered me a German citizen, so I had to register as an enemy alien.

Frankel: Do you recall what it says without necessarily reading it, basically what it said on the card?
KATZ: No, I don’t. I haven’t read it in years. 

Frankel: Before completing, are there any other memories that you have or any other statement that you wish to make?
KATZ: No, I really think that we’ve covered the territory. 

Frankel: Thank you very much for granting us this interview.
Applebaum:Thank you.