In front of a rapt Penn Hillel audience, a 97-year-old Penn alumnus recounted his harrowing Holocaust escape.
For Holocaust Remembrance Day, Penn Hillel managed a rare coup: an appearance by one of the dwindling cohort of Holocaust survivors, a 97-year-old Penn alumnus and former faculty member.
In an April 23 conversation at Steinhardt Hall, Michael Katz CCC’49 recounted his harrowing journey from Nazi-occupied Poland to Philadelphia before an audience of about 120 students and other Penn affiliates.
As a teenager, Katz dug his way out of a Nazi concentration camp, used false papers to hide his Jewish identity, witnessed the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and fought in the 1944 Warsaw uprising. World War II and the Holocaust cost him his entire immediate family.
After the war he was able to immigrate to the United States, where he studied zoology at Penn in the College Collateral Courses program—a forerunner of the College of General Studies, renamed Liberal and Professional Studies in 2008—before embarking on a career in medicine and public health. An expert in tropical diseases, he served as the longtime chair of Columbia University’s Department of Pediatrics, as well as a senior research adviser at the March of Dimes Foundation and a consultant to the World Health Organization.
Event moderator Ethan Burian C’25—whose late grandfather Andrew Burian survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mauthausen, and Gunskirchen concentration camps and two death marches—helped guide Katz’s discussion of his wartime experiences.
Born February 13, 1928, in Lvov, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), Katz was raised in a secular Jewish family with both Russian and Polish roots. His parents divorced when he was young. When Katz was 10, his stepfather, in the tea business, moved the family to Warsaw. But he and his biological father remained close. After a summer visit, they said what turned out to be their final goodbye the day before the September 1, 1939, outbreak of World War II.
“I never saw him again,” Katz said. “And that was a major tragedy of my life.”
After the German invasion, existence in Warsaw grew increasingly restricted and dangerous for Jews. Like tens of thousands of other Polish Jews, Katz and his mother fled east, rejoining her parents in Soviet-occupied Lvov. There, for a while, life was relatively normal. “We always had money,” Katz recalled. “There was music, there was opera, there were movies, there was theater, and, most important, there was school.”
But after turning on their erstwhile Soviet allies, the Nazis occupied Lvov in June 1941. Antisemitic restrictions followed, including the compulsory wearing of an armband with a Jewish star. “Things got, almost by the minute, worse and worse,” Katz said. Barred from school, he became an auto mechanic at a German Army garage. “I was as much an auto mechanic as all of you are auto mechanics,” he told the audience. But the job at least afforded some protection.
In August 1942, the Nazi occupiers began the so-called Great Action, which included mass deportations of Jews in Lvov to the Belzec extermination camp. From his workplace, at the suggestion of his bosses, the 14-year-old boy fled home, making his way past several German checkpoints. But he arrived to an empty apartment.
“When I got home,” he said, “I realized that I had no family. And I was truly petrified. And all of a sudden I was hit by anger,” an emotion he credits with saving his life.
Katz was taken to the nearby Janowska concentration camp, where he began plotting his escape. He realized that once the barracks were locked for the night, the guard force was reduced. He hid outside the barracks and used a shoehorn to dig his way through the fence. “I wound up in the local cemetery,” he said. “There was a newly built grave, and I was able to sleep on it.”
With the help of family friends, Katz acquired false identity papers and made his way to Warsaw. Passing as a non-Jewish Pole, he joined the Polish underground and worked for a German scrap iron firm. After the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began in April 1943, he remembers, “we saw smoke because the ghetto was burning.” He did not join the fighting, but, at the behest of the Polish underground, he made his way through the sewers to deliver a package to the ghetto.
A year later, he fought in the two-month-long Warsaw uprising against the Nazis, a battle that led to the city’s decimation. “There was tremendous chaos,” as well as severe food shortages, he recalled. He served as a “runner,” delivering items for the resistance, and also “would sit on the barricades with my rifle and shoot at the Germans from a distance.”
Katz was luckier than many. When the war finally ended, he was brought to the United States by an immigration organization. Arriving in May 1946 as a refugee, he was met by US relatives. But he said the immigration agency discouraged his interest in higher education, advising him instead to become a plumber.
Katz, having survived far worse, was undeterred. Informed that Penn was Philadelphia’s best university, he walked into the admissions office, explained his situation in “fluent … broken English,” and asked to be admitted.
As Katz explained in a note to the Gazette on the occasion of his 70th Penn reunion [“Alumni Notes,” May|Jun 2019], his request “was greeted with some amazement.” But he was able to meet with the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Glenn Morrow, a philosophy professor. And, after consulting with the faculty, the dean advised him that he could enroll as a special student, tuition free. “It couldn’t be any better,” said Katz. He would go on to an eminent medical career, including a stint as an assistant professor of pediatrics at Penn from 1966 to 1977.
During a Q&A after the Hillel conversation, one audience member asked how Jews in the US should react to rising antisemitism. Katz said he found the current situation confusing, adding: “My answer is that no one should be afraid. First of all, being afraid defeats you to begin with. You should not be afraid to act when something is inappropriate.”
The commemoration began with a ceremonial siren. It concluded with the lighting of six memorial candles in honor of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and a prayer of mourning recited by Hillel Rabbi Joshua Klein.
—Julia M. Klein
