By Angela Marshall
Leopold Katz's memory of his first encounter with Hitler's field marshal remains vivid. Katz, who at the time was an interpreter for the U.S. government, can still easily mimic Goering's arrogant mannerisms.
Within months, Goering would be dead, sentenced by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to hang for crimes against humanity. Even then, Goering refused to relinquish control, committing suicide before the noose could be placed around his neck.
For more than 40 years, Katz and his wife, Helga, have lived in Rockville Centre, their neighbors oblivious to the part the seemingly average couple played in history.
'It was much too late'
Helga Juelich didn't know she was a Jew until she was 10 years old, when Adolph Hitler came to power.
Although her mother was Jewish and her father half-Jewish, the family lived as Christians, attending a Lutheran church. "I'd never met a Jew," Helga said last week, sitting at the dining room table in her Hamilton Avenue home.
It wasn't until her father's arrest on Kristallnacht, Nov. 9, 1938, that Helga's family woke to the real threat against them. Because he was only half-Jewish, Mr. Juelich was released. But the danger the family had long sensed could no longer be ignored. They looked for ways to escape the country together, but, as Helga said, "It was much too late."
In the end, the Juelichs could only save their children. Helga's brother was sent to stay with distant relatives in America and, at 17, Helga was sent to be a maid in England. It was the first of many jobs she would take during the war.
She was an enemy alien and the people of Britain let her know it. "I went to church and people moved away," she said. "They wouldn't sit next to me."
Everything in Helga's world had changed, and soon after her arrival in England she received another blow. Her father, she was told in a postcard, had died of pneumonia. She would not learn until after the war that he had actually committed suicide to avoid deportation by the German police.
In 1940, the English interned all enemy aliens in a lower-middle-class resort on the Isle of Man, and Helga loved it there. A year later, at a trial to determine her status in England, she asked to stay at the resort but was denied.
Instead she supported herself, working in textile mills and, when there was a food shortage, in restaurants so she could eat. At first, the jobs paid so little that she had to go to the police to ask if they could find her a place to live. They placed her with a Quaker woman, who gave her a windowless room and fed her. At 20, Helga was drafted and sent to work in British aircraft factories, toiling for long hours in "miserable" conditions. Later, she did electrical engineering work.
When the war ended, Helga learned that the Americans were hiring translators for their German censorship unit, and she applied. She thought her mother might still be alive.
Helga still smiles when she recalls how good it felt to return to Germany on a big Army truck and to swim in the once-forbidden town pools. The signs at the pools in Offenbach, where she first worked as a translator, had once read, "No Jews allowed" but now read, "No Germans allowed."
Her soaring spirits sank once more, however, when she learned that her mother was dead, probably gassed in a concentration camp. She also learned the true nature of her father's death and wished her mother had followed his example. "She must have gone through terrible agonies," Helga said.
When the censorship unit was shut down, Helga applied for and was accepted to work as a translator in Nuremberg. That is where she met Leo.
You're in the Army now
Leo's own Judaism was never questioned. His father was a cantor and a schochet, or ritual slaughterer, for Nuremberg's orthodox synagogue. Leo went to Jewish schools and had little contact with non-Jews.
Calling him a realist, Leo said his father recognized Hitler's danger right away. His father searched for a position outside Germany and finally found one in Newfoundland, where he moved the family in 1937. The Katzes then moved to a chicken farm in New Jersey in 1941.
As soon as he came of age, Leo was drafted into the U.S. Army. As an enemy alien, he wasn't allowed to carry a weapon and was therefore assigned to the medical corps. But that didn't last long. When officials learned that Leo could speak German, he was made an American citizen and assigned to military intelligence. He went back to Europe in 1944 as a prisoner-of-war interrogator. Leo says his was the first American unit to enter Berlin.
"I felt a great deal of rage and anger [against the German people] at first," Leo said. It wasn't until he had to help a pregnant woman that he could once again see the Germans as people.
Even now he doesn't trust Germans his age or older. "I don't know what they did during the war," he said. "I don't give them the benefit of the doubt."
When he was released from the Army, the U.S. government hired Leo to be a translator at the Nuremberg trials. Seven years later, he was going home.
But it wasn't the city of his childhood. "The town was completely smashed," he said. "I didn't have any ties to the city itself, socially. They didn't want me there. I can't even call it my hometown."
He wore an American uniform and the Germans "groveled" before him. "Of course," he said. "None of THEM were Nazi."
Though he didn't trust the Germans, Leo said he never participated when others tried to degrade them.
One building that hadn't been destroyed by the Allied bombing raids was the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, and it was there that 24 Nazi leaders and their organizations were put on trial in October 1945, charged with planning and carrying out the war in Europe and systematically murdering millions of people. Four governments -- the United States, Great Britain, France and Russia -- issued the indictments.
Because the defendants, prosecutors and judges spoke different languages, a team of translators, Leo included, was brought in. Everyone in the courtroom wore headsets to listen to the translated testimony.
There were 12 translators at every session, three translating into German, three into Russian, three into English and three into French. It was the first time simultaneous translation was used at a trial. The translators sat in two rows, perpendicular to the two rows of defendants.
Leo translated English into German at the initial trial and stayed on to do the same at some of the subsequent trials for "lesser criminals."
It was then that he met Helga. He first noticed her when she was going up the steps of the courthouse for her interview. "There were a lot of steps to the courthouse," Leo said. "Helga was walking up the steps and I was walking behind her."
Helga jokes that Leo, one of the two men who interviewed her, hired her because of the shape of her legs. Kicked out of school at 15 for being Jewish, Helga only had a 10th-grade education at the time and was self-conscious because of it.
Days and nights in Nuremburg
During the day, the couple was immersed in talk of death and war. They were among the first people to see the pictures of what had happened in the concentration camps. Helga will never forget the movies of all the gold teeth that had been ripped from the mouths of the dead or dying.
The worst, she said, were the trials of the physicians who conducted painful experiments on children in the name of science. During one of these trials, some of the victims who had survived the experiments were asked to testify.
Leo recalled what happened when one of the experiment survivors was asked to identify the person who had tortured him. Instead of pointing, the man jumped out of the witness chair, raced across the courtroom and "started to throttle" the defendant.
At night, the couple learned about each other and tried to forget about the trials. Luck was on Leo's side when he won the right to purchase an automobile from the Army PX. There were few cars at the time, and Leo used his new Chevy to woo Helga by offering her a ride home one day.
On weekends they traveled Europe in the car. It was the first time in many years that the two were free to go wherever they wanted.
In a scrapbook, Leo has many photographs of the trials, which he got from a Russian photographer he had befriended. He also has a few original pages of his translations of the trial. The Katzes think they might donate the scrapbook to a Holocaust museum.
Leo returned to America after his work in the trials was completed and Helga followed in 1948. They were married two years later and raised two children. The couple moved to Rockville Centre in the late 1960s. They had a house built so that Leo could open an office for his psychoanalysis practice and Helga could open a music studio. Both continue to work part-time. Last year they held a 160th birthday party, celebrating their combined ages.
The Katzes lecture on the Holocaust at area high schools. Helga says the students often want to hear about the violence and are disappointed to learn she was never in a concentration camp. "We're escapees, really," she said.
Helga became an activist over the years, protesting and marching for causes such as civil rights, ending the Vietnam War and abortion rights.
"If somebody had spoken up," she said, "maybe my family would have survived."
