The story of Siegbert Katz

My grandfather, Siegbert Katz, was born in Germany in a small town in the state of Hessen called Nentershausen at 2 Elzebach Street.

He was named after his great-grandfather Salomon: Siegbert in German and Shlomo in Hebrew.

He was born on Tuesday January 14, 1930, to his parents Willy Katz and Martha Hamburger Katz. 

He had fraternal twin brothers, named Karl and Manfred, born on August 18, 1934.

He married Helen Strauss in the year 1955. They had 3 children, David the oldest born in 1956 , then Rochelle (my mother) in 1959 and the youngest, Alan in 1961.

Wedding 1955

NENTERSHAUSEN:

His family had lived in Nentershausen for hundreds of years, first as leather tanners and later as shoemakers. Soon after he was born, at the beginning of the Hitler years in 1933 with the persecution of Jews, only a handful of Jewish families remained in the town. 

In October, 1940 they were able to flee from Nentershausen and the Nazi persecution of the Jews to Ecuador in South America. This occurred just before the deportations of the Jews to the concentration and extermination camps which started in Germany in the fall of 1941.

SHOE BUSINESS:

As mentioned earlier, the family started in the leather tanning business. Later generations became shoemakers. It was an unwritten rule that the eldest son stayed at home and followed the profession of his father. Siegbert was the oldest son of his parents. Had it not been for Hitler and the Nazi persecution causing his family to flee to Ecuador, he probably would be a shoemaker today. A few months after arriving in Ecuador, his father started an orthopedic shoe making and repair business.

CHILDHOOD:

Toys:

Childhood home

Siegbert had the ubiquitous teddy bear as did all children of his era. He didn't have many toys or books of his own when he was a toddler and young boy. Perhaps it had to do with the era and the environment in which he grew up in. All the adults were preoccupied with the anti-Semitic conditions and the persecution of Jews in Germany. He did have a large set of lead soldiers he played with all the time. The toy soldiers were the standard boys’ toys in Germany due to the military inculcation of the German people. He also had some homemade toys like an empty thread spool with a rubber band through the hole that when wound up and released set it spinning. He did have a rocking horse. He also had some wind-up cars. Board games that he had were: Muehle (mill) a German game, Aggravation, checkers and later chess.

Stories:

Him and his twin brothers
 Carlos & Manfred

Stories he read included fairytales by the Brothers Grimm such as Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, etc. He also had the storybooks every German child had - stories of Wilhelm Buschs’s dreadful duo Max and Moritz and the Der Struwwelpeter.

However, they could not take any of his playing possessions along to Ecuador due to lack of space. During his early years in Ecuador none existed especially when they lived isolated on a farm in Calderon. His brothers who were four years younger than him must have felt even more deprived. But they didn't realize they had so little, when he compares the quantity toys, with those of his children and his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

His first grade class and their teacher

He entered the public school of Nentershausen in 1936, when he was six years old. The school was not too far from their house and in those days you walked to school. School buses were still an unknown medium of transportation. His first grade teacher taught several grades in the same classroom because there were not enough students to make a full class. For instance, there were only six students in the entering class (see photo). The teacher in the photo was a Nazi. His method of discipline was to hit a student’s upturned hand with a ruler. Many times he gave Siegbert smacks with a ruler on his open hand which was one of the corporal punishments of those times. In those days they hadn't heard yet, of the prohibition, to use corporal punishment, particularly on Jewish children. Gentile classmates picked on him because he was Jewish. Only a few days after Kristallnacht November 15, 1938, all Jewish children were expelled from German public schools and were allowed to attend only separate Jewish schools. Nevertheless, he had to grow up fast! At the young age of eight, he was sent away to a Jewish boarding school in the city of Frankfurt. His brothers Karl (Carlos) and Manfred never were able to go to public school in Nentershausen, even though by 1940 they were six years old and of school age.

The first school he attended in Frankfurt, the orthodox Samson Rafael Hirsch School, was actually a high school. Because of the urgent need, after Kristallnacht, they added classes for elementary school children like him. It was only a short distance from the Frankfurt Waisenhaus. However, shortly after he arrived in March 1939, the School was closed and the Nazis confiscated its building for use as an army barracks. He was transferred together with the other students to another Jewish school the Philanthropin, further away from the Frankfurt Waisenhaus. They had to walk through the Frankfurt Zoo to get there. On the way, many times they were accosted by Nazi youth who threw stones or tried to assault them. Philanthropin School existed from 1804 until its closure by the Nazis in 1942. With up to 1,000 students, it was the largest and longest-existing Jewish school in Germany. Following the WWII, the building again belonged to the Jewish community, which set up its administrative offices there. Unfortunately, there was an unsuccessful attempt to reopen the school. When he and his wife visited around 2009, it had been given back to the city of Frankfurt and was being used as a community center.

When he studied in Frankfurt, he boarded at the Orphanage of the Israelite Society or simply called Frankfurt Jewish Waisenhaus. The orphanage had been opened in 1918 by Rosa née Schwab and Isidor Marx. It was located at 87 Röderbergweg Strasse. Its normal capacity was about 70 children. At the time of his lodging, there were at least double that many residents. Beds were everywhere, in the halls and in the dining room.

ESCAPE FROM NAZI GERMANY:

In 1940, he and his family fled from the Nazis to Ecuador in South America. They traveled by train to Berlin and from there to Koenigsberg in East Prussia, today the city of Kalinigrad in Russia. From there They flew by airplane to Moskow. Air travel in those days in Europe hardly existed. In Moskow they boarded the weekly Trans - Siberian Express train for Vladivostok. their journey from Moskow to Vladivostok took seven days and seven night of continuous train travel over a 6000 mile route. It is still the longest railway line in the world. It crosses wide rivers, around Lake Baikal, and through the barren permafrost regions of Siberia. In Vladivostock they transferred to a train that took them to Harbin in Manchuria (today China). From Harbin they continued south by train into China, down the Korean Peninsula to Pusan and by ferry boat across the Sea of Japan to Japan. They again boarded a train that took them to the city of Kobe, where they stayed at the Jewish Community Center for several days. They continued their journey by train to Tokyo and the port city of Yokohama. Here they embarked the Japanese freighter SS Ginyo Maru that would take them over the Pacific Ocean from Japan to their ultimate destination in South America.

They sailed by way of Hilo in Hawai to San Francisco and Los Angeles, California and continued to the city of San Salvador in El Salvador and Balboa, Panama. Here they had to wait for about three weeks for the ship that took them to Guayaquil, Ecuador. They boarded this ship in Colon, Panama and went through the Panama Canal down the west coast of Colombia into the city of Guayaquil. From there they continued by train to their ultimate destination Quito,Ecuador. The journey took them three month.

They lived first on a small hacienda (farm) in the town of Calderon, near Quito. After about a year they moved to Quito, the capital city of Ecuador. Here they lived at various addresses until his parents at the end of 1946 sent him to school and yeshiva in Brooklyn, New York. He boarded at the Yeshiva Torah Vodaath for three years. In 1949 he went back to Ecuador for about three month until he had all his papers to emigrate to the United States. He lived at first at 551 186th St. in New York, NY, until he got married in 1955. He and his wife lived in an apartment at 659 162nd St., New York, NY, with their three children. In 1962 they moved to Brookline, Massachusetts. They lived at first at 146 Harvard St. and in 1965 they moved to their home at 187 Clark Rd., where they are still living today.

Education and employment:

After he graduated High School and Yeshiva studies, he continued his education at the City College of the University of New York to become an electrical engineer. After graduation he found employment at MIT "Massachusetts Institute of Technology" and worked on the space program. His first assignment was on the design of the inertial guidance of the Apollo Spacecraft and then on the Lunar Lander. He continued his work at the MIT Draper Laboratory for 32 years, until his retirement in 1994. He worked on various NASA, Navy and Air Force inertial guidance projects during his career at MIT and Draper Laboratory.

Today:

Today my grandfather at age 84 and my grandmother are living in retirement in Brookline MA, in the visinity of their 2 sons and their families. They come visit us a few times a year for the holidays.