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WEST VALLEY CITY — Abe Katz was 14 years old and on his way to work, when soldiers accosted him in the street.
They asked him to drop his pants. He complied. They saw he had been circumcised, as was his people's custom, and shipped him from his Polish village to Auschwitz.
“My name is Abe Katz, and I’m a survivor,” the 87-year-old South Salt Lake resident said. He survived to bear witness, he says, to tell his story — to honor the dead by telling their story.
He bore that witness Saturday, once again, moving many in the audience to tears at West Valley City’s Memorial Day tribute to veterans.
Katz spent the next four or five years barely alive, starving, often in pain, fatigued by constant forced labor and emotionally numb — horrified by what he saw, heard, felt and even smelled.
The screams, the cries, the smell — the smell of burning human flesh. No one can understand who hasn't experienced that.
–Abe Katz
The Germans used Auschwitz to sort the Jews and send them to other camps. Katz’s job there was to cut down trees, which the Germans used to build huge bonfires. Then, at gunpoint, the soldiers forced hundreds of gypsies into the fires to burn alive.
Katz and the others were forced to watch. “The screams, the cries, the smell — the smell of burning human flesh. No one can understand who hasn’t experienced that.”
Every morning, the prisoners were assembled in a stadium, forced to strip naked, and inspected by a monocled, stick-wielding “doctor.” Those deemed too old, too sickly, too injured, were marched off in one direction — to the crematorium. The others were led in the other direction to work.
“The only reason I survived and could tell you this story is because I was young and could work,” he said. “And they got a lot of work out of me.”
The only reason I survived and could tell you this story is because I was young and could work. And they got a lot of work out of me.
–Katz
It was brutal. They were given little food and worked long hours. “The people who couldn’t work anymore fell behind, and we’d hear a shot and another shot and another shot,” he recalled. “The S.S. just killed them because they couldn’t work anymore.”
Katz had a brush with the same fate. The workers wore rough, cloth shoes, nailed to a wooden sole. When the cloth wore through, separating from the wood, it became impossible to keep up with the other workers. His shoes fell apart and he began to fall behind. Katz asked one of the German guards “who was kind of a nice guy,” if he could take the shoes off one of the dead.
Another time, the prisoners toiled in a coalmine. Katz’s job was to lay new tracks, so the coal cars could advance with the miners. Once, he was kneeling to hammer a spike into the track. A sudden blast shot a load of rock onto his head, pushing him down. He fell against something sharp, slicing open a huge gap in his hand.
Katz shows the scar. It’s on his right hand, near two fingers. His left forearm also bears a scar of another sort. It’s a number: B-6282, tattooed to his left forearm. “We didn’t have names,” he said.
The wound to his hand got infected, swelling huge. His fellow prisoners felt they had to do something, or the young man would die. They had no training, but one sat on his head to hold it down, and others sat on each arm and each leg. They heated a sharp piece of tin, and cut into the wound. With his bare finger, a prisoner cleaned out the dirt and pushed.
We were just skeletons and dirty filthy, and the soldiers just looked at us.
–Katz
He still feels the gratitude. “They saved my life."
Katz spent time in two other camps before arriving at Buchenwald.
By now the prisoners were emaciated. They slept sideways, six abreast on planked, three-foot wide bunks. Every hour a prisoner assigned to keep watch would blow a whistle, and they all switched to the other side, so as to suffer less damage to their hips and bones.
Katz, who was 19 years old, weighed 78 pounds.
But the end was near. As the American troops inched toward Buchenwald, the German guards threatened to kill all the inmates, and they told them the camp was mined. Katz and others hid in a sewer, slimed in feces up to their faces. They could hear the sound of shooting that grew closer and closer.
Then, on April 16, 1945, there was silence. The Americans had arrived. The soldiers forced open the gates, and Buchenwald was free.
“We were just skeletons and dirty filthy, and the soldiers just looked at us.” At first, the Americans could only stare.
Then, the soldiers began to shower the prisoners with anything and everything they had — food, water, cigarettes — some even removed their shirts, so the prisoners could escape their filthy clothing.
I would give anything just to have a picture of my mother. A mother is the most precious thing you've got.
–Katz
General Dwight Eisenhower came with the troops. For his safety, his military guard asked the architect of the Allied invasion of Europe to remain outside Buchenwald’s gates, but he refused.
“I don’t need to stay outside,” he said. “I don’t need to be protected from these people.” As the he greeted Buchenwald’s gaunt survivors, Katz recalled, tears welled up in the general’s eyes. Eisenhower shook his thin hand.
Katz returned to Lutomeirsk, his Polish village. But no one was there; his family was gone. Townspeople told him the Germans had also taken away his father, his mother and his two sisters.
He spent days and days, traveling back and forth from Poland to Germany. He spent hours and hours, scanning every wall, every building corner where desperate relatives stuck hundreds of notes, hoping, begging to find loved ones.
At last he found his sisters. The three were reunited. “Anyone can’t imagine the joy I felt.” They survived.
His father and mother did not.
Of all the horrors, of all his suffering, the worst thing for Katz is imagining the pain his mother must have gone through, what she must have suffered that night long ago when her son didn't come home.
“I would give anything just to have a picture of my mother,” he said. Sometimes still, he will lie awake in bed trying to remember, trying to glimpse a clearer picture of her in his mind. “A mother is the most precious thing you’ve got.”
Eventually, the Jewish Federation helped Katz come to America, sending him to a sponsor in Utah. He learned a trade as a machinist and worked many years at Kennecott.
And he bears witness: “It could happen anywhere, at any time. It could even happen here.”
Email: lbrubaker@desnews.com
