Tuesday, May 16, 2006 - Lag Ba’Omer 5766 (Holiday)

As told by: Samuel Katz, Toronto, Canada

The spherical flask, die Thermosflasche, 16.6 centimeters in diameter by 32.5 centimeters tall, manufactured and sold with no casing, was given as an engagement gift by a friend of my maternal grandfather to my parents, Max and Betty (nee Kahn) Katz around the year of their marriage in 1935. He would come to my grandparents’ home on Hauptstrasse 20 in Mittelsinn, Bavaria, Germany, to give religious lessons to my mother (today’s address is Hauptsrasse 58).

After my parents’ wedding in the city of Fulda, in 1935 - Lag Ba’Omer 5695, my mother moved to my father’s home in the town of Guxhagen, in Hessen land (state) which was some 150 kilometers north of Mittelsinn. There, my father owned a house on Schulstrasse 51 (today’s address is Untergasse 1). That house was my father’s ancestral home where he and his 15 siblings were born and by all likelihood, my Grandfather Samuel and his father, my Great-Grandfather Jacob, were both born in that very house too.

My two sisters, Miriam and Yehudit, were born shortly after my parents moved to Guxhagen. Warm water was needed for the babies’ needs at night, but running warm water was not a commodity that was readily available in Germany of the thirties. So, my mother filled the gifted flask with a small amount of warm water and she kept this flask on a table that was located by the front window.

On the night of November 9, 1938, and into the following day November 10, Nazi Germany orchestrated a massive, coordinated attack on Jews, a pogrom throughout Germany and Austria. In the space of a few hours, about 1574 synagogues (constituting nearly all Germany had) were desecrated and burnt to the ground.

The stones, hurled by the Nazi mob at the glass windows, came crashing into our home. My mother lowered that thin glass bottle to the floor under the table and the incoming stones missed hitting the flask. The Nazis, the SS troopers, entered our family’s house and cast out through the windows, to the sidewalk below, furniture and other belongings. Miraculously, that fragile flask was missed again.

On that anti-Jewish pogrom night, storm troopers brutally attacked and murdered many Jews. About 30,000 Jewish males were arrested, among them my father. All detainees were transported to Nazi concentration camps where they were treated cruelly and hundreds died within a short time. My father was taken first to the Breitenau correctional facility within Guxhagen’s boundaries. Shortly thereafter, he was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp near the city of Weimar, some 200 kilometers to the east.

Release from this hell came only after the prisoners succumbed to the Nazi demands to arrange to transfer their property to “Aryans” and to emigrate. My father was released after 6 weeks of being incarcerated in the two camps. He returned to Guxhagen where he quickly made arrangements to get out of Germany.

My father’s brother, Sally Katz, with his wife Selma and four children left Germany for Palestine, 5½ years earlier in October 1933. Onkel Elieser, as Sally was known to me, emigrated when anti-Semitism became rampant throughout the land with the rise of Hitler. In his new home Sally became active in saving German Jews from the Nazi claws. He traveled several times back and forth between Palestine and Germany until 1939, when it was no longer possible, due to persecution and the political situation. On his last trip he did not enter Germany but he did manage to pay off border smugglers from the Swiss-German border to help get my family out. Ironically, the exit permit my father received as a result was from no other than the German Military Reporting Office to leave on a two year “vacation in Palestine”. Onkel Elieser was also instrumental in obtaining from the British mandate authorities (1922-1948) the prerequisite and coveted entry visa into Palestine. On February 10, 1939, my family escaped to Palestine, better known today as the State of Israel. I was born one year later.

Before my family fled Germany, they placed all they could in a wooden crate or “der Lift”, as my parents referred to it and they also took the Thermosflasche, the gifted flask. The journey they had to take was first by train to Trieste, Italy, and from there to board the ship, “Gerusalemme”, to the port of Haifa, while der Lift arrived several weeks later and it was placed under the guava tree on Onkel Elieser’s front yard, in the village of Ramat HaSharon.

When this Thermos was no longer needed for warm water at night, it was used every Friday for about 40 years to keep coffee hot for the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday). My parents who were observant religious Jews would not place anything on fire or use electrical appliances on the Sabbath. Thus, the Thermosflasche, this gifted flask, kept serving its purpose even many kilometers away from its home and even many years later in its new home.

In Israel this flask was always kept safely behind beveled glass doors in “der schwarze Schrank”, the black armoire. This Art Nouveau style (Jugendstil) carved wood cabinet, was also brought to Ramat HaSharon from Guxhagen in “der Lift”. My parents would never leave the flask on the eating table, lest it would break by accident. We children were not allowed to handle it till we were grownups.

I was told by my mother, of blessed memory, that this type of flask had originally been designed to be used in laboratories, to keep liquefied gases but the religious Jews of Germany found it very useful for their own personal purposes and the use of such bottles among them was wide spread. I can recall from my childhood seeing two more bottles of this kind at my Uncle Elieser’s home. He too, I was told, brought these with him from Germany.

These bottles use to be capped with a large size cork equipped with a folding metal spout in the middle but those caps did not last long and were replaced with just sheets of cloth and later on with plastic, squeezed together to form a cap, fitting into the top of the long bottle neck.

After my father’s death and my mother’s retirement, I had the privilege of receiving this Thermos from my mother, as a memento of where our family, the Katz-Kahn originated, our traditions and our way of life. My niece Rachel, Yehudith’s daughter, received “der schwarze Schrank”. It is still being proudly used in her home in Israel.

In June 1991, after visiting my mother in Israel, I carried this gifted flask, packed securely in a carton, and holding it on my lap, all the way from Israel via Amsterdam to Canada where I now reside.

Seventy one years later, surviving riots, travel and daily usage, this unique Thermosflasche, Thermos, flask, now sits in an armoire, behind beveled glass doors, in my dining room, in Toronto, Canada. It may be the only such bottle remaining in the world today. It is of course, the only one to me.

My grandchildren are not allowed to handle the flask till they are grownups… once they are, I will pass on to them this story and “die Thermosflasche”.

Samuel Katz