MDV 486 · Moisei Usherovich Katz

Katz describes his time in Monowitz: assignment to a barrack under a veteran kapo, the daily march to the factory accompanied by a prisoner orchestra, and digging trenches and carrying pipes. He, his cousin and his uncle obtain lighter work in the camp's work offices because they are young, and he helps a German political prisoner who is the block elder. After the bombing he is sent on a winter death march with almost no food, then on a week-long journey in open wagons to Buchenwald, where he recalls coffee and the crowded bunks. He and his cousin end up in the children's barrack and do no more labor until liberation by the Americans on 11 April, after being driven out of the barrack just before the end.

Gives details beyond the catalogue: the uncle's and cousin's names, the guards' flight to the bunkers, and Katz's later unanswered letter about Buchenwald documents.

Katz describes the weeks after liberation: many starved prisoners died from overeating, a quarantine followed, and the surviving boys registered as Czechoslovak citizens. He explains how the family name appears in several forms in his records. He, his uncle and his cousin travel toward home through Prague and Bratislava, meeting Czech and Soviet soldiers and being nearly sent to Siberia. They continue to Budapest, and on the way home they meet a Jew from Khust and spend the night at his house.

Adds the explanation of his surname registration and the encounter with a Jew from Khust, plus Czech attempts to keep the boys there.

Katz describes settling back in his home village and being offered an apprenticeship at a friend's bakery near Svalyava, to which he drove a cow seventy kilometers. He quits after a week or so and, on his cousin's suggestion, takes a driving course, paying for it himself, and gets his license in the late 1940s (1947 is heard). He drove until he stopped working at about sixty and then retired on a pension. Kerler then asks about his schooling, and Katz says he attended a Subcarpathian Rus' school rather than a Czech one.

Adds the switch to the school question at the end; the length of his working life as a driver is unclear.

Katz says he attended an ordinary Russian school, since Czech schools existed only in the cities, and mentions the languages he understood (some Czech, some Hungarian). He remarks on how Hungarians, Gypsies and Czechs viewed Jews. He then talks about working as a driver in a large garage with hundreds of employees, claiming that non-Jewish bosses treated him far better than Jewish ones, and recounts a dispute over delivery documents at a bottling factory. Kerler ends by asking about the synagogue after the war.

Katz explains that he moved to Khust in 1954, found the synagogue closed to him as a Soviet worker, and describes how Khust's eleven synagogues were reduced to one. He tells how old women at night resisted the authorities' attempts to take the building, and recalls the tax demanded of the congregation. He describes the later post-Soviet scheme to build a tavern on the synagogue's grounds near the former mikveh, an attempt involving a congregation head named Itsik Hoyfman. He is bitter that community members signed away the site, and criticizes Jews who buy bread on the Sabbath and the holiday revelry. Kerler asks the meaning of a building term he uses (a gutter or eave) and then starts asking food-term questions.

Adds the 1954 move, the synagogue's closure under Soviet rule, and a first set of questions at the end.

Kerler asks a short series of questionnaire items, including curses, the words for a Jewish and a non-Jewish cemetery, evil spirits (dybbuk) and the golem, and the word for a rod or whip. Katz also names a rebbe whom his father visited on the High Holy Days, but the rebbe's name is unclear. Katz is invited to talk about his childhood and cheder, answers briefly that songs were not sung there, and says pupils were beaten with a rod.

Katz also gives words for cemeteries, dybbuk and golem, and a rebbe's town (unclear), beyond the cheder topic.