Holocaust Survivor's Journey

Kyt · Nov 5, 2007

Holocaust survivor will revisit cave that hid family

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/broward/story/294188.html

More than 60 years after surviving the Holocaust by hiding, Yetta Katz will return to the caves where she spent 344 days.

The depths of a Ukrainian cave shielded Yetta Katz and her family from almost certain death during the Holocaust.

She spent 344 days -- from May 5, 1943, to April 12, 1944 -- in the dank space, sleeping between her sister and mother for warmth and cooking meager meals of potato soup.

In May, Katz, now 84, is set to travel back to the Ukraine and Priest's Grotto, the 77-mile-long cave where her family and a few others lived out the war, as part of a film documentary.

''I am very sad to go to the city where my friends were, where my neighbors were,'' Katz said at her Hallandale Beach condominium, where she spends half the year. The rest of the time she lives in Montreal.

``It's a terrible thing to go through such a horror. I don't feel good to go there. It will hurt me a lot. . . I don't know how I will go in those caves.''

Before the war, Katz (born Stermer) lived in Korolowka, Ukraine, with her mother, father, three brothers and two sisters.

When the war broke out, about 500 Jewish families came under German occupation.

As the Nazis began killing Jews in the town, Katz's family went into hiding. They took spots under the roof of the family's home and in other villages.

Then the Nazis rounded up the Jews from two towns into a ghetto, but Katz's mother, Esther, believed this meant death for her family. She told her oldest son to find a place in nearby caves, a tourist attraction before the war.

But the first cave where they made a home for 150 days had no potable water or ventilation to cook, and living out the winter was trying.

As the spring thaw came, Germans found potatoes and onions near the cave that the men had tried to haul back at night, giving away the secret of the families inside.

FLED THROUGH TUNNEL

The Gestapo came, threatening to kill those inside, and they fled through an emergency tunnel the family had dug.

The families, including small children, searched for a new place -- some hiding under the roof of a farmhouse -- while the young men in the group went looking for somewhere else to conceal them. A local hunter told the men a fox had run into a hole in a field and there might be a spot to hide.

''They went with ropes and candles to see what was there,'' Katz said. They came upon a spot of earth and began to dig. It turned out to be Priest's Grotto, one of the largest caverns in the world.

''They got so excited for the first time in six months,'' she said. The men took the families -- 38 people in all -- to the cave.

Each family brought some things for survival -- her family brought a pot, a small stove, tools and candles.

It was the last time Katz saw the light of outside for nearly a year.

Recently, Katz has had flashbacks of her horrific experience because the hurricane shutters on the condo next door block the afternoon sun and part of the view of the sky.

''For so many days I didn't see the daylight, now not to see the sun,'' she said.

''It's terrible,'' she said. ''I've suffered so much. I didn't see the daylight.'' While in the cave, they slept slept more than 20 hours a day, cooking the few potatoes and water they had into soup. Sometimes, Katz would sing Polish songs. The men would go out foraging every five or six weeks, bringing back grain and wood.

''We weren't scared, we were together,'' Katz said. ``What could we do? All our village had been killed. We didn't think about it. We couldn't worry what would happen. We were together.''

They lived in the cave until April 12, 1944, when a Ukrainian family living in the woods left a message in a bottle at the cave: The Russians had come.

''We came out, full of mud, and walked to the city. All of the houses were broken,'' she said, pausing for a moment. Tears come to her eyes as she points to glossy photos of her children and grandchildren from her grandson's wedding.

``Because of my brothers, I survived and my two grandchildren got married.''

After the war, her family went to a displaced person's camp in Germany.

That's where she met her husband, Abraham Katz, who died 18 years ago. They married in Munich, Germany, and she had her daughter, Faye Gallat, in 1947. Two years later the family moved to Montreal.

MIRACLES

''So many miracles and coincidences occurred for them to survive,'' said her son, Saul Katz. Katz's children will make the trip back to the Ukraine with her in May.

When the families left the cave, they left behind some of their belongings -- shoes, keys, pots and pottery. In 1993, New Yorker Christos Nicola was exploring with a Ukrainian caver when he found some of the shoes, a millstone and earthen steps in the the cave, indicating people might have lived there.

He heard stories from local farmers that Jews lived in the cave during the war and spent years trying to find out if people really lived there and tracking down the families. About 10 years later, a relative of one of the survivors contacted Nicola over the Internet.

Since then, Nicola has recorded hours of interviews with them and cowrote the book The Secret of Priest's Grotto: A Holocaust Survival Story, telling the story of life in the cave.

''They only had light in the form of kerosene or candles two or three times a day for no longer then a few minutes,'' said Nicola, who has gone inside the caves with family members of those who survived. ``Temperature of 52 degrees, 100 percent humidity. If you're not properly dressed [a person] can become hypothermic . . . People ask how they survived. They taught themselves. They weren't afraid to think outside of the box.''
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