By Alex Costello
Not only was the sound terrifying, but it was surprising as well, because the Germans had imposed a 10 p.m. curfew after taking over the country.
A Jew in hiding who had grown up in Uzhorod, Czechoslovakia, Katz looked out the window and saw something he could not believe: German soldiers had backed up dump trucks, usually used for transporting gravel, to the bank of the Danube River. The beds of the trucks rose to pour out their cargo, but it was not gravel. Jewish children came tumbling out of the trucks and into the frigid river water. Any who tried to swim ashore were shot by the Germans.
"Not one, not 10 -- there were thousands of them," Katz recalled recently. "... They collected the children, and drowned [them], from November 1 to November 16 -- over 10,000 children in front of my eyes."
Hungary had been occupied by Germany just eight months earlier, and recently the Hungarian government had fallen after months of trying to resist Germany's power. A pro-Nazi regime had been put in place.
Officers of the Third Reich began rounding up Jews en masse to send off to concentration camps, but they did not have trains to get them there. So they forced them to march, for many miles, to the camps. The officers would separate the Jewish parents from their children and promise them that they would be reunited once the parents had completed their work.
But night after night -- after the 10 p.m curfew, so as not to be seen by as many people -- the Germans were breaking that pledge to the Jewish parents, systematically disposing of their children.
Katz, who is now 84, lives in Lawrence and has a doctorate in the history of the Holocaust, told his story on Nov. 9 at the Kristallnacht Commemoration at the Young Israel of Oceanside. That Sunday marked the 70th anniversary of the night in 1938 when Nazi soldiers rampaged through Jewish neighborhoods in Germany, Austria and other German-occupied areas, looting stores and homes, breaking windows, burning synagogues, and beating and murdering Jews. The night came to be known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.
The gathering at Young Israel listened silently to Katz as he recounted the events leading up to that night, and the six-year-long Holocaust that followed it. The event was chaired by Young Israel members Hedy and Ben Lipschitz, and two other members, Marilyn Weisman and Mark Diskind, helped arrange for Katz to speak.
Katz gave two accounts of the beginning of the Holocaust: the Nazi version, and what he described as the factual version. According to the Nazis, the murder of a German Embassy official in Paris by a 17-year-old Jewish boy named Herschel Grynszpan sparked the violence as a kind of retribution. At the time, Grynszpan explained his actions as a last, desperate act to shed light on Germany's deportation of 15,000 Jews to Poland.
According to Katz, however, the Nazis' pogrom against the Jews started long before Nov. 9, 1938. That spring, shortly after Germany annexed Austria, the Nazis took over a Jewish village called Keedze and forced its 300 residents into a nearby forest. The following day, the Germans were gone, and the villagers walked back to Keedze. When the Nazis found out, they marched back into the town, this time loading the townspeople onto a barge on the Danube and setting it adrift. The Jews spent months on the boat before they were finally allowed to enter Hungary as refugees.
A tale of survival
Katz was 14 on the night of Kristallnacht, living in Uzhorod. His parents, his oldest brother and his brother's young family died in concentration camps during the war. But Maurice and eight other siblings managed to survive, constantly on the run from the Nazis for years. They managed to steer clear of them with the help of a gentile lawyer friend, a Mr. Toth. The Katzes were brushmakers, so when they were forced to split apart, they developed a secret code to deliver messages: a brush. If someone came to any of them with a brush, they knew that the person could be trusted.
After an assassination attempt on Hitler, the Germans began looking very closely at the people in the country. They were looking for spies, communists, homosexuals and, of course, Jews, among the Czechs. "Anybody who was not desirable," according to Katz. So Katz and his younger brother had to flee from their hiding place working on a farm in their home town owned by Toth. His sister Hainal was in Hungary, having fled there right after the Czechoslovakian government fell to the Nazis, and she sent a Nazi soldier to help Katz get out of Czechoslovakia. The only way Katz knew he could trust the soldier was because the soldier brought a brush with him.
"How did I know I could trust this Nazi?" Katz said. "A Nazi comes looking for me, how can I know he's authentic?"
The Nazi found Katz, and showed him a brush. Katz, knowing his family's code, knew there was something hidden in the brush.
"I opened it up, and inside was money and a letter from my sister," Katz said. The letter read, "Do whatever this soldier tells you to do." Once in Hungary, Katz's sister gave him and his brother gentile papers, and they were able to walk around free for a while and get jobs at an auto shop.
After about two months, Nazis came to the auto shop where he and his brother were working and wanted to see everyone's papers and check their backgrounds. Katz and his brother managed to escape, and along with their sister, fled.
They fled to Budapest, and Katz managed to secure a job working in a supermarket. Food industry workers were exempt from being forced into the German army, so Katz had convinced a Hungarian gentile to sell him their papers, since known gentiles were not really checked by the Germans.
That was how Katz wound up in Hungary on the tenth floor of an apartment watching young Jewish children being murdered. "That's what they did with the children," Katz said. "They had those big trucks, and they just throw them down. And those that tried to swim out, they shot them."
When Katz finished his talk at Young Israel, some of the listeners gathered around him to ask questions.
"I thought it was extremely inspirational and meaningful," Golda Dubner, a member of the Young Israel Sisterhood, said of Katz's tale. "The stories of what he did and what he went through, and how he managed to survive. And, considering what he witnessed, that he's still sane."
Comments about this story? ACostello@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 207.
