Today is a different kind of day in Israel. Last night, when the day officially starts on the Jewish calendar, there were memorial events for the victims of the Holocaust with the one at Yad Va’shem broadcast on every television station in the country. For someone like myself, who only found out later in life how many family members we had lost to poison, fire and bullets, there is a confusing sense of loss and believe it or not, hope.

The destruction of European Jewry is all but finished. What the Germans started, the Muslims and Catholics are ending. In 1936 there were 9.5 million Jews living in Europe, and as far as I can tell the muslim population was almost non-existent. Ninety years later there are roughly 1.3 million Jews left in Europe, and there are somewhere near 46 million Muslims. What started with Hitler is ending with Mohammed.

Around 12 years ago our youngest son was assigned a project at school where he was required to interview a Holocaust survivor. He asked if I thought my father, Rabbi Joseph Katz, z”l, would be a good person to talk to. Born in Guxhagan Germany in 1932, my dad rarely spoke about his experiences growing up, in fact almost never, but from what I knew, I told him if my father agreed, it would be a worthwhile pursuit. Little did I know. What I thought I knew was nothing compared to what I was about to find out.

Filming the video of my son’s interview, I realized that, while I had heard much of what my father had told me, including my dad and his parents getting out go Germany in May of 1941, it wasn’t until my father said something that made me stop the camera and interrupt.

“Yeah, I have my passport in my sock drawer.”

I told my dad it might be helpful for the project if my son could add a picture of the passport to his report. My father returned from his bedroom and placed the three passports – his and my grandfathers as well as his uncle’s, on the table in front of us.

There are moments in a person’s life that are so jarring they become seared in your memory forever. Looking at the front cover of his passport with its big swastika, I could not wrap my head around the fact that I never knew these existed. “Dad, did you ever think, at some point over the past 50 years, you could have found a minute to say something like: “Chaim, can you please pass the salt and ‘Oh, by the way, I have a Nazi passport in my sock drawer’?” My father responded in his usual casual fashion, “I didn’t think it was important.”

My father passed away on the eighth day of Sivan almost eleven months ago at 93 years old, leaving my mother, four children, and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It was a life well lived – all the more so when you consider he almost never got to the age of ten.

Fast forward a few years to the summer of 2019. My wife and I took a trip to Israel; my first time back in 34 years. Having loosely planned our itinerary, we took a morning to visit Yad Vashem-the Holocaust memorial complex in Jerusalem. There is a famous section at the museum set aside for non-Jews who helped our people survive the war years, called the Avenue of the Righteous. Having always been interested in seeing it and paying homage to those special people, we set out to find it. I now know it is outdoors, a few memorials lining a sidewalk. But back then, our search took us into a building, where we were met by a man named Ephraim. He directed us to follow him. I had experienced plenty of silent walks like this as a child, most of which ended up with a visit to the principal’s office. My mind danced as I imagined what life in an Israeli prison would be like. Ephraim sat us down opposite a desk and calmed my concern by asking, “Where are you from?” After we gave him some general information, he asked about our parents and grandparents and I mentioned to him my father had left Germany in May 1941.

“May of ’41? You sure?”

“He has his passport that verifies the date.”

“That’s very late to have a passport. Do you have pictures of it?”

I told him I had sent them in an email to my siblings after they were discovered in a sock drawer and assured him I would forward them when we got to our place in Jerusalem, which I did. His response was just a simple “Thank you! I thought nothing of it until one day a few weeks later, I received an email from Ephraim asking if my father would be willing to loan the passport to Yad Vashem for safekeeping. “We don’t have many passports from 1941, especially as late as May of that year.”

“Dad, Yad Vashem is very interested in your passport. Want to give it to them?”

“What do you mean, nope?”

“I mean I don’t want to give it to them.”

“You’re gonna just leave it in your sock drawer?”

“Why not?” he asked almost talmudically, which anyone who interacted with him would surely recognize.

“Because it’s a huge part of our people’s history, and it would help expand what people thought they knew.”

“I’m just letting you know that, when you go, I am going into your sock drawer and stealing it from whomever you wanted to leave it to and then sending it to Yad Vashem.”

It wasn’t too long after I informed Yad Vashem of my father’s response that Covid became a worldwide issue. As most of the globe shut down, the last thing on my mind or anyone else’s was my father’s passport. That all changed when, two years after our first meeting, I found an email from someone else at the museum letting me know they were still very interested in the passport.

Of course, my father’s opinion on the subject stayed the same, and I told Yad Vashem if anything changed, I would contact them. That change occurred following a life-threatening episode when my father was hospitalized sometime in 2022. A few weeks after surviving the hospital and rehab stay, he asked if I could do him a favor.

“Can you get a professional photographer to take pictures of every page of the passports so next time you go to Israel, you can give them to Yad Vashem?”

To say I was a little surprised would be an understatement. “Who are you and what did you do with my father?”

I reached out to a professional photographer and good friend of mine, who was very meticulous and could not believe what he was shooting. He kept mumbling things in Hebrew. I only wish I knew then what I know now; I could understand him today. I contacted Yad Vashem; they were thrilled, to say the least. We set up a time for that summer, and the woman asked if I could please provide her with as much background information as possible for when we handed the passports over. My father did his best, but my instincts told me that a lot of the information he relayed came through the eyes of the nine-year-old boy who arrived on Ellis Island, Labor Day 1941.

At our meeting in the museum later that summer, my instincts were confirmed. It took the woman quite a while to find information on my grandfather, more because I couldn’t spell Guxhagen, but once she did, she told us she had found a 100-plus-page document of financial transactions between my grandfather and various Germans and Americans as well as both the German and American embassies. Being fluent in German, she looked through them for a few minutes, then said, “It seems there is a gap in payments. There are a couple of years of payment. Then, in 1939, there is a large payment, after which payments stop until a bit later in 1940. There is another large payment in 1941, and that’s where the transactions end. Can you ask your father if he knows anything about this?”

“Dad what happened in 1939?”

“It seems there were some kind of payments that Zeidy was making to people, which stopped in 1939 after a big payment and then a few months later continued until right before you got out in 1941. Did anything happen in 1939 that you know about?”

“Well…” Again, for anyone who knew my dad, they would recognize that when he started sentences in such a manner, information was on its way. “In 1939 I was taken to the American embassy.”

“We were preparing to leave Germany. They were weighing me and taking my height and a few other things. They were talking to me in English. I didn’t understand English.”

“So, what did you do?”

“I spoke to them in German.”

“And there wasn’t anyone at the embassy who spoke German?”

“I don’t know. They kept asking me questions, and I kept telling them in German I didn’t understand what they were saying. I kept yelling at them, ‘I don’t understand English, I don’t understand English.’”

“They yelled back at me and eventually didn’t let us into the United States because they thought I was crazy.”

“And you thought this information wasn’t pertinent to tell me? What happened after that?”

“I walked out of the embassy and took a walk down the block.”

“He eventually caught up to me…”

“You’re a seven-year-old Jewish boy in Nazi Germany taking a walk?”

“So, what you’re telling me is you’re yelling at these people and then went for a walk?”

“This is what happened.”

“Dad, you’re saying you are basically the same person at 91 as you were at seven?”

My father smiled and broke out into the little laugh he had and said, “Yeah, pretty much.”

My father, along with his parents and grandmother, made his way to Brooklyn, New York, where he went to yeshiva and eventually the Mir Yeshiva in Brooklyn. In between, he completed his Brooklyn College degree in psychology, taught in various universities and, most importantly, dedicated himself to working for and on behalf of the Jewish people. He spent 24 years teaching and eventually became the principal of a day school in Pennsylvania. Eventually he found his true calling as the campus rabbi for Baltimore area colleges which he thoroughly enjoyed for two plus decades.

I could go on for days, but I hope I was able to give you a small snapshot of the world my father, z”l, lived in and the legacy he left behind. When he was in the hospital in 2022 he had to be medicated quite a bit and there were times when he saw things which took me a minute to understand.

“Chaim, you have to lock the door, do not let them in. We can’t let them inside.”

“Can’t let who in, dad?”

He grew very agitated and had a scared look in his eye, something I had never seen before. “You don’t see them? They’re at the window, do not let them in.” He said a couple things in German which I had not heard him speak once my grandfather passed away.

“Who is it dad? The Nazis?”

“Yes, be quiet. Don’t say anything or they will hear you.”

He kept on like that for quite a few minutes, but I eventually calmed him down by telling him I had secured the room and wouldn’t let anyone take him. It was then I realized there was so much more my dad never told me and I would never know. Once he came out of the state he was in he did what he always did and said nothing about his years in Germany. When I asked him about it, he simply shook his head, closed his eyes and said nothing. So I let it go. But he made me wonder. How scared he had to have been the few times they came and took his father away to work camps. A little boy watching nazis, daily, in the street, at his doorstep, inside his home.

How lucky am I to be alive?

Allow me please to close with a personal note: A couple of years ago I sat down with my father and told him I got a job offer in Israel. We told him we were moving to the Holy Land, but I felt I needed to ask his permission to go because of his health situation at the time. His first response pretty much settled it before I could even address the issue.

“That’s wonderful. Do you have a place to live?” That pretty much ended the conversation. I never saw my father again once we left as he got sick and passed away before I could get back to America. But we did speak every week and knowing he had his same mental acuity until his last days was a great comfort to our entire family.

I would be remiss if I didn’t add one last anecdote about his time in rehab, when he sort of showed that, as frustrated as he was with his perdicament, I could still get a laugh out of him.

“Chaim, you must get me out of here. This is the worst place I have ever been in my life.”

“Dad, you were born in Germany.”

“Okay, so it’s the second worst place I’ve ever been in my life.”

To think that my grandfather escaped death by mere moments on a few separate occasions, is not lost on me. More so than my dad, he never, ever spoke about his life in Germany. He was a very quiet man and I always wondered what he saw when he laid his head down at night. However, there was one moment during my teenage years when he let something go and I like to believe he did so on purpose. It was the one and only time I ever heard him even hint about what he had gone through. Nothing about his time in Bergen Belsen work camp, or the others he was subjected to, or what he had to do to protect his family and move them to safety against my grandmothers wishes.

We were sitting at the Passover seder and when we came up to “V’he She’amdah” I caught my grandfather wipe away a couple of tears.

“Zeidy, what’s wrong?”

“In every generation they rise up to destroy us,” he said, “but Hashem saves us from their hands.” He took a deep breath and wiped away another tear then said, “I won the war. They tried to kill me. They had armies, tanks, guards, gas chambers…an entire country behind them and they are no more. They’re all gone. They lost. I won and now am sitting here with my grandchildren and giving thanks to Hashem for saving me and I want to tell you that I know these words are true. I know Hashem saved me and I thank him every day.” And with that he sat quiet as the seder continued. That was the only time I ever heard him say a word about his life in Germany.

My grandfather did what he had to do to keep his family safe at a time when everyone around him wanted them all dead. It is a testament to the kind of man he was and the amount of courage and fortitude it took to survive and ultimately give me life. It is not lost on me that generations have come from him and carry on the history of a people targeted for annihilation, only to survive, rebuild and thrive.

The players may have changed, but the game remains the same. Only this time we have rewritten the rules. Gone are the days when they can abuse us and attack us without consequences. Yes, the noise is louder and the deceitful tactics and fictional narratives overwhelm the airwaves. But we are still here and this time we can fight back. The world reallydoesn’t like that and being we are infected by two thousand years of wanting their approval, we turn on each other in hopes we will get a gold star from people who curse our existence. But it will never happen. There will always be something or someone they can blame to keep us from their embrace. The quicker we learn to forget about their approval, the better we will be.

A few moments ago the entire country of Israel took a minute to recognize those who perished at the hands of an evil regime. Traffic stopped, people stood in silence and the only noise that could be heard was a siren reminding us what day it is. It is because we recognize our past in this way that we can be confident in our future. We are a country and a people that do not forget and our memory is very long.

Whether you like him or not is irrelevant, but my father’s classmate Rabbi Meir Kahane z’l summed up our current situation perfectly.

“I would rather be a Jew alive in Israel that the world hates than a dead Jew in Auschwitz the world loves.”

May the memories of all the souls who were murdered in cold blood as the world stood silent, be blessed.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)