[Cz-L] Ya'acov Katz

Dear Fellow Czernowitzers:
   
  I somehow tripped over your site and spent hours exploring it.
   
  Somewhere along the line I went into shock and lost my breath. I thought I had been confronted by a ghost. My own.
   
  One of your members, a Ya'acov Katz, had submitted a photograph of a primary grade class at Scoala Elite, which was my class.
   
  I have a similar picture, probably taken the following year, with most of the same children and staff, but positioned in different locations in the picture.
   
  In this picture I sit with legs crossed in the front row with my buddy, Hans Noe, now a retired architect in New York, sitting next to me.
   
  You can't imagine my reaction. Beneath the picture it indicates the estimated period to be between 1933-1935. I was born in 1927 and would have been about nine in that picture, so it would have been 1936 or even 1937.
   
  I presume that Ya'acov Katz was in that class. I would very much like to get in touch with him.
   
  For your information, I come from a longish line of Czernowitzer. My maternal grandmother, Sallie Rauch married Adolph Todres who died of pneumonia at age 27, leaving her widowed with two daughters under the age of 3; Lana, my mother, and Hilda, her sister.
   
  Sallie taught herself how to sew and design clothes and became one of the most important couturieres in Eastern Austria. She built a 20 room mansion in which I was born and she died at age fifty when I was six.
   
  My father, originally Hungarian from Arad, had studied medicine, interrupted by WW I, was sent to the Russian front by the Austrian-Hungarian army where he was taken prisoner and shipped to a lumber internment camp in Siberia.
   
  After the war he made his way back to Europe via Vladivostock and Indo-China on a French tramp-steamer up the Red Sea and through the Suez.
   
  He didn't go back to medicine and became employed by Baron von Neumann's textile conglomerate. Having learned German and Russian during the war, he was sent to Czernowitz to represent Neumann in Bucovina and Bessarabia.
   
  He was in Berlin on a business trip in 1933, during the Putch, I believe, which convinced him that Europe would have a war again. We emigrated to Canada in April of 1939, arrived in Montreal on May 4th, missing the the war by a few short months.
   
  Hilda, who had married Julius Gutman, had my cousin Turi, and got out of Romania with some 40 Jewish families who traded all their belongings for a boat with holes in it which went down off the Dardanelles.
   
  They all survived but were not allowed entry to Palestine by the British and were interned on Cyprus for some time.
   
  Julius died in Israel and Hilda remarried a man named Schlossberg who had a daughter named Leah, whom Hilda adopted. Leah subsequently married Yitzhak Rabin.
   
  They are all gone now.
   
  I am planning on visiting Israel for the first time next month to look up some other old Czernowitzers and to see Turi's children and grandchildren.
   
  I became a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen, had a career on Madison Avenue, just had a book published and, in my 81st year, will start production on a number of feature films in India, Japan and Hong Kong.
   
  I would very much like to contact Ya'acov Katz. Can you provide an address?
   
  Thank you in advance,
   
  Andrew Halmay
  403-221 Russell Hill Rd.,
  Toronto, ON M4V 2T3 Canada
  416-925-1271
   
Received on 2007-08-22 18:23:20