Holocaust survivors reunite to share memories, celebrate survival

By Tal Abbady

South Florida Sun-Sentinel

8 March 2005

"I was young, I was strong, I was witty," said 79-year-old Katz. "But I was most of all lucky. What more can I say? There were people who were far better educated. I had a brother who was smarter, more cultured than me. He died."

Eighty-two-year-old Spiro recalled his father's words to him when the Germans overran Nowy Sacz in 1939: "Go children. Save yourselves."

The men met by accident at the first meeting of Cafe Europa, a program for Holocaust survivors sponsored by the Ruth Rales Jewish Family Service of South Palm Beach County, Fla.

After a long embrace, the two locked arms and sat at a table as the streets and blocks of their Polish boyhoods seemed to roll out before them.

"I'd heard he was alive," Katz said of Spiro. "But it was impossible to find him."

Cafe Europa was conceived to bring survivors together to share the memories that, for many, have circumscribed a lifetime. When the event was planned and budgeted, organizers expected about 70 participants. But more than 500 survivors signed up to attend, many of whom were bused to Zinman Hall, on the campus of the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County, from communities in Florida's Deerfield Beach, Delray Beach, Boca Raton and Boynton Beach.

Funded with money from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, organizers hope to hold Cafe Europa gatherings four times yearly. It is a way for survivors to forge friendships through the lonely burden of Holocaust remembrance and testimony.

It is also a race against time as survivors, about 4,000 of whom live in South Florida, enter the waning years of their lives.

"Time is running out," said Jaclynn Faffer, director of the Ruth Rales Jewish Family Service. "This event gives survivors a sense of family, a place to reawaken memories in a way that makes people glad to see one another. We all search not to be alone with our memories."

When Meyer and Katz were reintroduced by a mutual acquaintance who knew they were both from Nowy Sacz, the 65 intervening years seemed of little consequence.

"We spoke about our school, our teachers, the old Yiddish theater in our neighborhood," Spiro said.

In their stories is encapsulated the bleakest period in modern European history. Katz spent time in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen Belsen, from where he was liberated, the only survivor of his immediate family. He worked as a silk weaver in Sweden after the war. He married another survivor, had children and moved to the United States in 1948.

Escaping the deportations in Nowy Sacz, Spiro fled to the woods, foraging for food and making his way to Nazi-occupied Ukraine. He was caught and barely survived the starvation and disease of several concentration camps, ending up in Transnistria. After the war, he worked as a carpenter and eventually traveled to Sweden, where he married and had children before moving to the United States in 1953.

Spared the fates of their parents and siblings, the survivors that filled Zinman Hall are now grandparents and great-grandparents eager to leave a record, if only in the telling and retelling of their story, of the experience that has turned them into living artifacts.

Susanne Reich, 80, of Debrecen, Hungary, was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and then to a munitions factory that used Jews as slave labor in Allendorf. She still marvels at her own survival.

"I don't know how. There was no food. No food. All day we were lifting heavy munitions pieces." With liberation in 1945 came recovery, marriage and as normal a life as a survivor could eke out in the years after the war.

Today Reich has an easy, earthy laugh and shares pictures of her great-grandchild. But depression shadows her, she said.

"I do talk about what happened, but not to everyone. And I can't forgive. How? Maybe if they hadn't killed my parents."

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