Look at the picture and then up the building in front of you. This place tells the story of Martin Katz who helped hiding other Jews fromt Nazi persecution. Find out more about the story by watching Martin’s interview and reading his biography.
Martin Katz was born in 1919 in Bukovina into a Jewish Orthodox family. The region belonged to the Habsburg monarchy until 1918 and then to Romania. His father Nussen Jakob Katz was a butcher, his mother Dora Katz (née Löbl) a teacher. They moved to Vienna in 1927, where the parents hoped for less anti-Jewish exclusion.
After the so-called Anschluss, Romanian citizenship initially protected the family from persecution. Nevertheless Nussen Katz had to close his butcher shop. To feed the family, father and son risked trading illegally on the black market. In the summer of 1940, while trying to buy meat, Martin's father was arrested by Gestapo agents and beaten to death.
One day, the 19-year-old Martin Katz met the Jewess René Lang - she and her mother were threatened with deportation. He helped them to go into hiding by finding them a hiding place by a porter here on the 7th floor, organizing food and giving the hider money in return. As an "U-Boot" he sometimes changed sleeping places every day. In order not to attract attention, he also passed himself off as a person from the German minority group in Romanian.
In 1943 he emigrated to Hungary but failed to live there under a false identity. After surviving the Nazi period in a Hungarian labor camp, Martin Katz made a name for himself as an innkeeper and theatre producer in Munich and Vienna. His mother died in 1943 after being deported from Vienna to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp; René Lang survived.
His interview was recorded in Vienna, Austria in 1997.