The stage lights obscured the view of the audience crossing stage to my seat. I took one last relaxing breath. Opposite me sat a sweet-faced woman whom I had only recently met, old, hard of hearing. She was about to share her story, a story I would remember for the rest of my life. Today was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I was the moderator in front of hundreds of listeners. Being a leader in my local B’nai B’rith chapter, I was chosen to moderate part of the evening’s lecture and felt challenged by the opportunity to help a survivor share her story. Little did I know that Ethunia Bauer Katz, the woman I was interviewing, would awaken a plethora of emotions inside me and ignite a passion that would start me on a path of self-discovery.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Buczacz,” she replied with a smile.
“Buczacz?” I felt a bead of sweat run down my back. Why hadn’t I asked her this yesterday? Searching for composure I adjusted myself in my seat. I felt butterflies in my stomach and blood rush to my cheeks. Buczacz was where my family was from and where my family suffered through the Holocaust while meeting their “final solution.”
Leaning forward, I wanted to reach across the space between us and embrace her. I wanted to tell her that my family was from Buczacz, that I know other survivors from my family who are alive today. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know if she knew my family. For the moment, I was still the moderator.
As Ethunia Bauer Katz described Buczacz, I hung on every passionate word. With a renewed curiosity, our dialogue became less scripted and more natural. Our conversation took a somber tone as she described her life in hiding and on the run. She described the “aktions” in Buczacz when Jews were rounded up, shot, or transported from the ghetto, never to be seen again.
After the interview, Mrs. Katz and I spent almost an hour talking. She knew my family, not intimately, but as part of the community. The next day I ordered her book, Our Tomorrow’s Never Came. I inhaled every word. Her story was almost the same story as that of my grandfather’s cousin, Pesach Anderman, whose book, The Power of Life, I read a few summers ago.
This experience has sparked my interest in learning about my Jewish history. I spent many hours online researching Buczacz and my family tree. I opened the cardboard box of family photos in search of relatives who survived and those who did not. Staring back at me were faces of individuals that represented an unfulfilled life: a life that was robbed by the Nazi program of dehumanization and genocide.
After this interview I wanted to know more, I was in search for more. As mentioned earlier, I was a leader in my local B’nai B’rith youth group. This organization gave me the opportunity to retrace the steps of Mrs. Katz and my ancestors in the International March of the Living, a two week trip where we visited Poland and Israel.
Landing in Poland, feelings of anxiety, fear, and nerve overwhelmed my body. I remembered what Mrs. Katz started to teach me. I knew that I was about to see things that I could never unsee, things that I could never explain and things that I could never have imagined to be true. Marching from Auschwitz to Birkenau alongside 13,000 other Jewish teens has been the most powerful experience of my life. We walked where our ancestors walked, where they were headed towards their death and where we were walking freely today. I couldn’t help but think about Ethunia Baurer Katz’s story and how she was only one of millions. After visiting the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps, it lead me to a better understanding and a new perspective of the importance and significance of this tragic event and what it means to me.
Before my chance meeting with Ethunia Bauer Katz, I saw the survivors as sad, old people. I was unable to comprehend the individuality of each person. There was always that number— six million. Ethunia Bauer Katz helped me see the six million and the survivors as individuals with a more focused and mature lens. I can now begin to fathom that each of those victims was a person with a life, a family, and a story of their own. I believe that everything happens for a reason. My meeting with Ethunia Bauer Katz was fortuitous, a necessary occurrence in my life, a meeting which reaffirmed the very personal importance of where I came from and my responsibility to ensure that the memories of the victims remain alive for my children and for the rest of humanity.