We Are What We Remember: The Story of Erwin Katz

The Story of the Boy Erwin Katz

Never teach history without also telling a story
Yehuda Bauer

The most dangerous enemy of memory is abstraction.
In this sense, it is important
to remember the "Victims of National Socialism"
not so much in anonymous and politically aseptic ways,
but to learn again, for example, to tell stories:
the story of this father, Shlomo Wiesel,
this mother Lena Donat,
this girl Eva Heymann,
or of this boy, Erwin Katz …
'The Holocaust is not six million,
but One and One and One and One …' (J. Miller)
adapted from Christoph Münz

Many years have passed, since I, together with my old friend from flat-sharing and college days, Petr Abeles, visited the Jewish cemetery in Frankfurt. There, on the gravestone of his just recently deceased mother, Hilda Abeles, née Katz, was written – to my confusion at the time – not only her name, but also the names of her parents, Samuel Katz, Gisela (née Halpert) and her younger brother, Erwin, with an additional small inscription:

In memory of those
who have no grave

Who was this little boy Erwin who died in 1944, at the age of ten, in Auschwitz? Petr promised me that he would ask his now 84-year-old aunt, Jolana, the oldest sister of his uncle Erwin, about the story in more detail, and she told him about her little brother:

"Our family lived in Huklive, a small village on a country road in the wooded Carpathian Ukraine. This region lay at the easternmost tip of Czechoslovakia, a country created after the First World War. In our small village we spoke Rusyn, Ukrainian or Yiddish.

Our parents in those days owned a small farm that lay beside the road. The farmhouse consisted of two attached dwellings. My father's brother lived in the other half of the house. We were on very good terms with this uncle and his family. We had two horses, six cows, chickens, sheep and a dog. In addition, we owned some fields and meadows where, for our own use, grain, potatoes and fodder for the animals were grown. In the long winter months, when there was nothing to do in the fields, my father often took his horses and went with some men from the neighbourhood to cut wood in the surrounding forests, or he got employment for a few weeks in one of the many sawmills of the area.

When Erwin was born into this poor but sheltered world on December 12, 1933, it was cause for great celebration for the whole family. Father who, as it happened, had his birthday on the same day, had now finally got the longed-for "son and heir." Not that he loved us three older sisters, Jolana, Hilda and Rela any less – our parents loved us above all else – but Erwin was simply a boy, and he was father's pride and joy.

What should I tell you about our brother, the little blond whirlwind with his wide-awake blue eyes? He was lively, intelligent and in my memory almost always happy. And he was very fond of his three big sisters. At noon, when lessons ended in our one-room village school, which was run by a nice Czech teacher from Prague, little Erwin would often stand for quite some time at the living-room window, intently watching the village street. As soon as he saw his sisters he would come running towards us and tell us, wildly gesticulating, what the excitemts of his morning had been.

For me there was no better welcome after a long morning in school. I can still see his little face before me, beaming with joy and with wide open eyes.

Erwin had many friends and playmates in the village. He especially liked being with his cousins from the attached house, our uncle’s children. They would roam around in the village and its surroundings for hours, completely oblivious to time.

Once – I remember – there was great excitement in our street. During one of their wild games in the meadow behind the house, Erwin had fallen into the local cesspool and would have drowned, had his older playmates not pulled him out of the stinking sewage just in time.

When he was six years old your uncle Erwin, too, started at the village school. By that time we sisters were attending the high school in Mukachevo, the capital of our district, about 60 km from Huklive. We stayed with relatives there, paying rent, and saw Erwin and our parents only at weekends and in the holidays.

Erwin seems to have been really good in school. Mother would often tell us, when we came home, that during the week the boy had again come home from school specially happy and, full of pride, had put a large egg on the kitchen table: a gift from his classmates for helping them with their homework yet again.

We children picked up hardly anything about the major, threatening political events of the time. After the break-up of Czechoslovakia at the beginning of the Second World War, our area became Hungarian again and so we had to learn a language completely foreign to us in our Mukachevo high school.

It was only quite late on, in March 1944 that we Jews were forced to wear the yellow star. How Erwin would have felt about this, I don't know. For us older ones this stigmatization by the star felt very degrading, terrifying even. In our area up until then, there had not actually been any real anti-Semitism.

And then everything suddenly happened terribly fast:

On the morning of April 18, 1944, they came: a brutal gang of Hungarian policemen, armed with batons and machine guns. The Jews of the village were allowed just half an hour to pack up essentials. For us as children and young people, it was a terrible shock. We had never expected anything that bad.

An Anthology of Citations Across Three Generations of Germans

The Story of the Boy Erwin Katz