Standing in a crowded banquet room in a Philadelphia Holiday Inn this fall, Eugene Katz worked his raspy voice like a bellows.
The 83-year-old Napa resident pumped as much energy as he could into his tired vocal cords, softly but forcefully emitting the words that told his fascinating story once again.
It’s a story of escaping Nazi Germany that was detailed in a 1994 historical novel titled “To Cross a Line,” written by his daughter-in-law, Karen Ray.
Katz wrote his own short story about the experience, which was published in two installments, in June and September, in the Sunday supplement of a newspaper in Germany. It was also published in the yearbook at his high school in Germany.
His story is also about his battle to get officials of his German hometown to acknowledge wrongdoings of the past and to erect a monument to Holocaust victims there. Katz returned for the emotional unveiling on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1988.
In October in Philadelphia, he had a captive audience for his story at the Rickshaw Reunion — an annual gathering of Jews who lived in China in the late ’30s and ’40s after fleeing the Nazi onslaught.
“There weren’t too many of us oldtimers there. Most of them were second generation,” Katz said. “They seemed very interested in my story.”
It began more than 60 years ago, when he was making deliveries for a bakery in Bremen. It was a few months after Kristallnacht, when more than 1,100 synagogues were burned, 300 people murdered and thousands arrested in synchronized attacks on Jews all over Germany.
His vehicle collided with a motorized SS bike and his relatively tranquil life was over.
“I had always fitted in somehow, I guess because I didn’t look Jewish,” said Katz, who had blond hair. “But unfortunately, I had that collision. They found out they had missed me on Kristallnacht, and ordered me to report to Gestapo headquarters the next morning at 6 a.m.”
Instead, the 22-year-old Katz (whose first name in German was Egon) sneaked off to his brother’s house in Hamburg. There he girded himself for an even more daring journey, an “Uncertain Journey,” as he called it in a story he would write more than 50 years later.
Katz made his way through forests and knee-deep snow, successfully hiding his Jewish identity from border guards and eventually making it to Copenhagen.
“Give for Germany’s suffering Jews,” read a large banner placed over the main street near the train station. “I felt warm now,” Katz wrote in his short story. “These people seemed really willing to help Nazi victims.”
Katz went to the synagogue and told the rabbi of his plight, only to be spurned. “You think that coming here and being a burden for us, your problems are solved? I cannot help you,” Katz wrote of the rabbi’s response. “You must report to the police immediately. Here are two kroners for a sandwich.”
Katz did as the rabbi said and turned himself in to the Danish authorities.
“I was brought up to respect authority,” he said in a recent interview. “I was young, still in my early 20s, and that was the culture I was brought up in.” He also believed “Denmark had a reputation for helping all the Jews, which I know now is not true.”
The Danish authorities deported him to Germany, where he landed in prison for the border violation and the scooter accident. German officials also tried to accuse him of other crimes, such as disgracing the German race by “having relations with a German woman.”
Katz knew that he had, but he wasn’t sure if the Gestapo really had something on him. After all, his former employer at the bakery was one of only three people who knew about it and he wouldn’t squeal to the authorities, would he?
Katz spent two months in prison. Luckily, the widespread deportation to concentration camps “wasn’t until a few years later,” he said. “Jewish people could still leave the country if they had a place to go.”
In March 1939, Katz was released from prison with a passport and an ultimatum. He’d be sent to a concentration camp if he didn’t leave the country within three days.
Fortunately, his brother Bruno had a ticket for passage to China, which he promptly gave to Egon. After a train ride to Genoa, Italy, he was on his way to China with the equivalent of $2.50 in his pocket.
Bruno and his sister Cecilie eventually joined Katz in China, but Katz said his mother was exterminated at Treblinka, and that his sisters, Leni and Gertrud, perished in concentration camps somewhere, their exact fates lost to history.
In China, Katz served as a foreman in a European bakery. After the war, he worked as a baker aboard a U.S. Navy ship, then learned a few tricks of the seamen’s trade and became a second officer with a Chinese shipping company.
In 1947, he moved to the Richmond District in San Francisco and met his future wife, Elisabeth, who was also from Germany. He became a certified public accountant 14 years later and still has some clients, despite being close to his 84th birthday.
In the late 1980s, Katz helped lead a drive to get a memorial to victims built in his hometown of Barntrup in northwest Germany. His main contribution was a scathing letter to the mayor and the town council, which he wrote when intense opposition to the memorial almost halted the project.
Katz said his letter was written in “severe tones” and “sprinkled with the German word for ‘subhuman.’
“I said, ‘Don’t tell me that was a war in bad times. War is against an enemy, not against your own neighbors.’ I put all of that in my letter and it really shook them up.”
Two years later, he said, “They erected a remembrance stone and also a warning for future generations.” On the stone is the name of Katz’s mother, two sisters and two cousins.
The town, which had a population of about 3,000 to 4,000 at the start of World War II, had only two Jewish families then.
“When they deported my mother on a truck in broad daylight, nobody protested,” said Katz, who attended the ceremony with some family members in 1988.
Atop the small monument, wrapped with metal symbolic of barbed wire and with Stars of David in the front and back, is a quotation from the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”