Elka- EllaPerez Katz
RelatioNet Project 2019
June 7th 2019
Blog code: RelatioNetELPE39MABE
Interviewers: Shani Erez, Hila Fefer Contact interviewers: Shaniknik10@gmail.comHp.fefer@gmail.com
Survivor information:
Last name: Katz
Previous name: Perez
First name: Elka- Ella
Fathers name: Shlomo Perez
Mothers name: Shaina- Haia
Date of Birth: 02/03/1939
Town of Birth: Grodno
Country: Intermittently occupied territory by Russia, Poland and Belarus. Today the town is in Belarus’s territory.
List of places:
Marcinkonys, Belarus (Lithuania- now days)
Grodno, Belarus
Pushtze forest
Ulno, Germany
Haifa, Israel
Kfar Malal, Israel
Kfar Saba, Israel
Background:Grudno (Hordna) is the capital of the Grudno district and the Grudno region, located in Western Belarus near the borders of Lithuania and Poland. Founded in 1127, it was a Slavic settlement. A Jewish commune was created in the city in 1389, in order to aid Grodno’s reconstructions, a fact that had made the city a great center of trade, commerce and culture.
As many other cities all around Europe, it had a significant population of Jews before the Holocaust- 22,700 residents, who constituted about a half of Grudno’s population at the time. The Nazis occupied the city during 1941-1944. They herded the Jews into the Grudno Ghetto and afterwards to the German extermination camps, where the majority of the Jews were killed. According to 2019’s census, there are 373,547 residents in Grudno. The district now has an active Jewish community in the city.
Marcinkonys was a small village in Belarus, between Grudno and Lithuania. It was known as a settlement since 1637, when it was a camp of foresters. The village began growing after the building of the railway station and train to Warsaw (Saint Petersburg Railway), in 1864.
In the village, there was a ghetto for lithuanian and belarusian Jews during the Holocaust (Marcinkonys Ghetto). Until the Holocaust, there were about 270 Jewish residents, who either escaped or were killed. The village, to this day, is old fashioned, and according to the 2001 census, has 765 residents.
Ulno DP camp (Ulm)
Situated on the German Danube, Ulm is a city that became a home for a complex of five Displaced People camps after the Second World War: Sedan-Kaserne, Hindenburg-Kaserne, Bleidorn-Kaserne, Boelke- Kaserneand the Donaubastion (a part of the ancient fortress). It is estimated that 6000-7000 Jews lived in the camps between 1947-1948, although, not only Jews lived in the camps. Among the many nationalities of the DPs were Polish, Ukrainian and Arabs. The camps had schools, a medical staff, kindergartens, job-trainings, Rabbis and Yeshivot and even a sports club (Ha Koach).
Before the war:
Elka (Ella) Katz lived in Marcinkonys, Lithuania, a small village, near a railway station between Grudeno and Vilnius, (formerly Poland). In 1935, Marcinkonys had a small Jewish community that had contained approximately 270 Jews. The town had a Jewish school and a Jewish youth organization. There was no anti-Semitism in her town before the war.
Ella’s father job was producing and selling pickled mushrooms. Her grandmother was a loom weaver who sold yarn and threads around the area. She was good at her job and everyone in town knew her. Ella's family was not very religious, but her father was the most religious of them.
In the picture: The Marcinkonys railway station
During the war:
Jewish activity was banned from Marcinkonys since 1939, but on June 24th 1941, the Natzis had invaded Marchicunis. In that year, there were many crimes committed by the Lithuanians against the jews, mostly robberies and a few murders. The Jews were forced to wear a yellow David star.
Ellas family did not leave Marchicunis because their lives were good. They could not imagine that something like the Holocaust would happen.
Ghetto Marcinkonys:
In April 1942, 600 Jews (including Ella and her family) were transferred out of their houses and into 14 houses in the Marcinkonys Ghetto. They were allowed to take only small suitcases with them. The ghetto was extremely crowded. Every day, the men worked and came home with food.On the second of November 1942, trains arrived in the train station near the ghetto. All Jews were told to line up. The young people, including Ellas parents, tried to fight the German soldiers and revolt. At that time, the Jews already knew that the trains led to Auschwitz. The Germans began shooting at the people that escaped. Ella was only a child then, about two years old. Her mother was shot as she tried to escape, and had died during that shooting.
Ella's father took her, and began running. Ella was told that under her fathers Yellow david star, he kept a coin. A bullet was shot in her father's direction, but it hit the coin and saved her father from dying during the shooting. He kept running, holding Ella in his arms. When he got to the wooden fence of the ghetto, he tried to break it with is hands. Ella fell off his arms, and her father managed to break the fence. He started running, leaving Ella behind, on the ground, but after a few minutes, he had returned. Ella and her father hid under a haystack for three hours. Silently. Who ever managed to escape was no longer there, and the rest have been shot. After a few hours, Ella's father ran away with her into the woods.
At the entrance of “Pushtze” woods, Ella and her father met a Lithuanian man who used to be a friend of Ella's Father. He asked him for help, but the man told them to run away before he would throw his axe at them, and so they continued running into the woods.
In the woods, Ella and her father met the rest of the people who managed to escape- Ella's Father's mother- Shifra, his sister and cousins, and another family- the Kobrovski’s- Reuven, Henka and their children.
Living in the woods:
Living in the woods was a huge challenge. The temperature got down to -40 degrees in the winter. There was snow everywhere, covering Ella up. They lived there for two and a half years (1942-1944), eating nothing much and wearing the same clothes. Sometimes, at night, Ella's father and the other men would run into the close villages and steal food or clothes. They were partizans, and tried to sabotage the German soldiers by doing actions such as putting bombs under the railway.
They bathed in defrosted snow. They hid near the swamps, because the Germans never came near them. There were so many mosquitos, and one time Ella's father and Herself fell into one of the swamps and started drowning, but their family managed to rescue them.
Ella says that her Grandmother used to sit with her and banish the mosquitos that were around her with a tree branch.
These were two and a half extremely difficult years for the family- they were always hungry there. Usually, Ella ate a small piece of bread that her family managed to steal at nights from the villages that surrounded the woods. In the right season, Ella collected berries and mushrooms.
In 1945, Ella’s family knew it was safe to leave the forest because the Partisans told them that the war was over.
Ella and her family fought for survival because of their lust for life. In her opinion, There isn’t anything that can rise above it. It was obvious for them that they had to fight as much as they could in order to stay alive.
After the war:
After Ella and her family left the forest, they moved to Grodno, because they saw that locals had occupied their house in Marcinkonys. Ella stayed in Grodno for about a year- with her Father, Aunt, cousins and the other Family that had survived with them in the forest. The house that they stayed at was ruined, and a school is built over its property until today. In Grodno there were a lot of gypsies, and everyone was afraid of them because of the fact that they kidnapped children and stole clothes. After a year in Grodno, Ella and her family moved to another city in Poland for several days to stay with her step mother, and then moved to Germany, which was completely ruined. In Germany they lived in a Displaced Person Camp (DP) named Ulno (Ulm).
In the picture: Playing outside in Grodno.
Life in the DP camp:
The Joint supplied Ella's family with food- yellow butter, bread and sugar. They had neighbors, and for the first time in Ella's life, she had experienced friendship. She had a friend named Ida. They all lived in one room. The children went to a school that was located outside the camp. One time, as Ella was walking to school, some Germans yelled at her that she was a Jew. She was scared.
Immigration to Israel:
Ella and her father immigrated to Israel on a ship call “Atzmaut” (“independence”) on the 8th of May, 1949. They docked at the port of Haifa, where her uncle, who already lived in Israel (in Haifa), waited for them. She lived at his house for a couple of days, while her father took care of logistic issues- such as buying a land in Kfar Malal in order to build a farm and a house on. He also signed Ella up to elementary school.
In the picture: Ella and her Father
Ella in Israel:
Right after moving to Kfar Malal, Ella began 4th grade. She already knew Hebrew, so it was not a difficulty for to get used to the language since she learned Hebrew in the DP camp’s school.. She had many friends at school, who were very interested in her previous life. With all the changes that came up at the time- her name was also changed by her teacher- from Elka to Ella, the name she goes by today. When she grew up, she moved to Kfar sava with her family, and studied at Katzanelson high school in Kfar Saba.
Ella met her husband, Tzvika, when she was 16 years old. She and one of her friends dated two boys that they did not like. On one of their dates, Ella and her friend brought another friend, so they told the boys they should bring another friend- and they brought Tzvika, who was a soldier at the time.
Eventually Ella and Tzvika fell in love, and got married after they finished serving at the army.
Ella served as a main administrator at the Artillery Force.
After getting married, Tvzika and Ella lived in Kfar Sava, in a house bought to them by Ella's Father. She opened a kindergarten named “Gan Ella”, and managed it until she retired.
They had four children, twelve grandchildren and one great- grandchild.
Looking back:
It was not always easy for Ella to talk about the Holocaust as it is today. When her Children were young, she did not speak about the Holocaust, but when she wanted to visit Poland the first time, she told them the story. Since then, her children used to ask her father questions about the Holocaust every memorial day.
Due to the fact that Ella was very young during the war, she doesn't have many memories of the events that occurred then, and so she doesn't have any nightmares or bad memories. She does have fears, and she is certain that they have something to do with her experience in the war.
Ella has visited Marcinkonys a few years ago with her family and children. her child, Alon, said: “Since it became realistic, I couldn’t understand it anymore”. She couldn’t compare it to the way it was when she was a baby (since she was very young) but she said that the village was old fashioned. The locals still use wells as their water suppliance and it seems that after the war they had not reconstruct the village. The roofs were like old times. There is a monument for all of the Jews that had been killed during the war, and a mass grave where Ella’s mother, grandfather and aunt are buried.
Ella never thought about if or how the war influenced her belief in God. She said that her father became more religious after the war, but she never questioned her own belief in God. She does believe in God but she is not religious. “It never changed”.
Ella is very proud of her children and grandchildren, who all of them served or still serving the Israeli Defence Force as majors.
Lately, Ella had begun participating in “Zikaron Basalon” and in projects that sent her to tell her survival story in schools.
She emphasizes that even though she hoped she could forget the horrors she had went through, she believes that is very important to pass the story on.
Ella is very active today. She likes to cook, bake, exercise, and play bridge.
She would like to pass her family and her surroundings the message that they should keep believing and acting in order to keep our country safe and secure.
She would like people to remember of her that she always laughs and smiles, that she is a good friend and that she is always trying to make everyone happy.
In the picture: Ella, her husband and her uncle visiting Marcinkonys’ memorial site in the “Pushtze” woods.
Ella’s high school graduation picture with her Math teacher- Huz.
