by Amanda Jermyn

I never knew my grandfather’s brother, Julius Katz. He was born in Kassel, Germany, in 1875, the eldest of eight children of Isaac Katz and Mathilde Wertheim. My grandfather, August Katz, was born in 1879, the fourth child and second eldest son. In order to help provide an education for the younger children in the family Julius and August were sent to earn a living in South Africa, each at age fifteen. When the Boer War broke out in 1899 Julius was living in Fauresmith, in the Orange Free State, working in his uncle, August Wertheim’s general store, Wertheim & Co., while my grandfather was a bookkeeper for Saffery & Co. in Humansdorp in the Cape. As Julius was based in Boer territory he fought for the Boers, while August, in British Humansdorp, fought for the British, although this did not in any way diminish their affection for each other.  While serving as a Captain in the Bethlehem Commando[1], Julius was captured by the British at the Battle of Magersfontein and sent to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) for one and a half years. During that time, he and my grandfather wrote to each other regularly, though their letters were heavily censored, and my grandfather sent Julius food parcels through the Red Cross. When the British won the war in 1902, the two defeated Boer republics became British colonies. The British assembled all prisoners of war, including Julius Katz in Ceylon, and asked who wanted to go home. All hands went up. But when they heard they would have to take an oath of allegiance to King Edward VII, some refused. Many of these men settled in Argentina, Paraguay and Angola. Most however, like Julius Katz, went home and became “British Subjects by Conquest.” After the war, in 1904, when their uncle retired, August and Julius Katz bought out his store in Fauresmith and ran it together.

Unlike their uncle who had a mistress, there were no women in the lives of my grandfather and his brother Julius at that time, so they sent for their sister Johanna, who was single and living in Kassel, to keep house for them. She arrived in 1912 at age thirty to cook, run the household and generally see to their welfare. For their amusement they installed a billiard table in their house so they could all three play billiards without having to go to the one in the town bar. Julius and August swam nude in the Riet River, they all three went on picnics in the veld, played with their little white dog, and went on outings to polo games where the women wore long white dresses and hats and carried parasols.

In 1914 my grandfather went to Germany to visit his family and to look for a wife. He sailed up the east coast of Africa on the German East Africa Line’s R.P.D. Tabora, stopping at Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam and Aden. His ship sailed through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, stopping in Port Said, Egypt, then traversed the Mediterranean, stopping in Naples. The boat’s final destination was Hamburg. This journey took five or six weeks. Shortly after his arrival, World War I broke out, with Germany siding with Austria-Hungary against the Allies. While his brothers David and Willi Katz were called up to fight for the Kaiser, the war forced my grandfather to remain in Kassel, though he did not initially realize what would be in store for him. Though he was born in Germany, he was by then a naturalized British subject. So on January 29^th 1915 he was interned as a “Colonial Englishman” in the Ruhleben concentration camp near Kassel. The prisoners were not treated badly, but food was scarce. The Germans had very little food, and what they did have went mainly to the military. With their own civilians starving, one can only imagine how little the prisoners of war received. Just as August had sent his brother Julius food parcels when he was a POW in the Boer War, Julius, in South Africa, sent food parcels to August during World War I.

Meanwhile, their two brothers, Willi and David Katz, who were officers in the German army, fought bravely and greatly contributed to the war effort. Willi, an actuary and mathematician, developed a formula for lobbing shells long distances. The Germans had created some very long range artillery with which they bombarded cities like Paris. Willie calculated the trajectories of missiles (how much to elevate the gun and how much powder to put in the shell) so that they could be fired most advantageously. David, a psychologist, helped soldiers who had been shell-shocked and traumatized by their experiences. For these contributions both were awarded the Iron Cross in 1917. When the commanding officer who pinned the medals to their chests asked if there was any favor they would like granted, they asked that their brother be let out of the prisoner of war camp. As a result, in 1917, my grandfather was released on parole. It was around this time that he met his future wife, Frieda Prager, who was actually related to him. My grandmother Frieda was the first woman admitted to the medical school at Heidelberg University and she had to fight hard for the privilege. Later, because of her efforts, her sister Irene was able to attend too. In 1918 Frieda qualified as a dentist.

In 1919, after the war was over, my grandfather returned to Fauresmith, bringing with him his wife Frieda and their baby daughter, Mathilde, known as Tillie. Although fully qualified, Frieda was not allowed to practice dentistry in South Africa. Because Germany did not recognize South African qualifications, South Africa did not accept the German ones. Soon, two more children were born, my Uncle Wally, in 1921 and my father, Robert, in 1923. Together with Julius, my grandparents ran the general store, Wertheim & Co. My grandmother also ran the household, made butter and cheese from milk from the family’s cows, sewed the children’s clothes and cut their hair.

Both August and Julius served as deputy mayors of Fauresmith, and Julius became mayor in 1910, serving for six years. Julius was a city councilor for 12 years, a justice of the peace and chairman of the Chamber of Commerce. During the 1918 flu epidemic Johanna and Julius tended to many of the flu victims but never became ill themselves. They attributed this to the fact that they ate lots of garlic. In 1929 Julius retired to Kassel, and Johanna went with him.

In 1928, before their departure, Johanna was given an autograph book by her friend, Mrs. Board, for her 46^th birthday, which we still have today. In it family and friends drew sketches, wrote poems, good wishes and wise sayings. Among them was one from my grandfather, August Katz:  “Something that is great and enduring to aspire towards:  Pleasing one’s fellow man is still the best that one can do in the world.”[2] This quotation from the Austrian poet, Peter Rosegger (1843-1918) sounds just like my grandfather, the sweetest, kindest man one could imagine. Another entry was one from my grandmother, Frieda, which, translated from German, reads: “Memory is the one paradise that can’t be taken away from you.” I thought of this quote when my father, in later life, suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. Unfortunately, sometimes memory can be taken from you. I’m just glad my grandmother never lived to see this happen to her son.

After Julius and Johanna moved to Germany in 1929 my grandparents continued to run the general store, and the children attended school in Fauresmith. Up until 1933 there had been little anti-Semitism in the Orange Free State. Since the earliest times, the Afrikaners and Jews had got on well together. Religious Afrikaners viewed the Jews with respect, as “People of the Book,” and others valued the European culture they brought with them to the wilds of Africa. With the rise of Hitler, however, Nazi propaganda began to spread. My father remembered being beaten up by children at his school for being a Jew. When he complained to the school principal about this, the principal’s response was, “You must have done something to provoke it.” My grandparents had become concerned about the rise in anti-Semitism, but this was the last straw for them. In 1938 they left Fauresmith and move to English-speaking Cape Town where the political climate was more favorable.

Meanwhile, in Kassel Johanna and Julius lived at 112 Koelnische Strasse along with some of their siblings. After Hitler’s rise to power they returned to South Africa in 1936 for good. They settled in Oranjezicht in Cape Town where Julius died of a coronary thrombosis in 1941 at age 66. Johanna later lived with her sister, Sophie Hornthal, in an apartment in Sea Point where I remember visiting them with my family on Sundays for a very proper German afternoon tea, with cream cakes served on good China.

There is a strange coda to the story of Julius Katz. In 2015, I was asked to write an article about the Baumann branch of my family for a South African genealogy journal called Familia. The article was later posted, with permission, on the website of the South African Jewish Special Interest Group, hosted by Eli Rabinowitz, a former South African living in Australia. In August 2024, I received an email from Eli in which he forwarded a message from a man called Pierre Nortje from Durbanville, near Cape Town, who wrote that he had read my article on the website. He said that he had in his possession an old passport and some other documents that had belonged to Julius Katz (mentioned in the article). He attached a few photos of these. He offered to give the documents, free of charge, to any relative of Julius who might be interested in having them, if someone could collect them from his home in Durbanville. I told Eli that I was definitely interested, and subsequently asked my sister-in-law, Lara Jermyn, who lives in Cape Town, if she would be willing to drive out to Durbanville to collect the documents from Pierre. She very kindly agreed to do so and then mailed them to me in the US.

I was, however, curious to know how Pierre had come by the passport and other documents he gave me, so, when I wrote to thank him, I asked him this question. He told me that an acquaintance of his, Nazeth van Greunen, had inherited them, but he didn’t know anything more about the matter. This made me even more curious as I had never heard of either Pierre or Nazeth before this correspondence and wondered if Nazeth might be related to our family in some way. So, when I wrote to thank her, I asked how she came by the documents. Here is her reply:

Dear Amanda,

You are most welcome! I’m so glad that the documents are finally returning to your family. My aunt (Breggie Cloete) was a nurse in Cape Town who cared for sick patients in their homes. Sometimes, when these patients passed away, their family gave my aunt something as a token of appreciation for her work. In this instance she was given a beautiful needlework table. When my aunt passed away in 2005 at the age of 83, my mom inherited the table. When my mom passed away in 2018 the table came to me. While going through the drawers I discovered the documents and have ever since wondered how to find some family member that might be interested in them but didn’t really know where to start.

When I met Pierre I gave him the documents hoping that he might be able to find someone. I was happy and amazed that he was able to find you! Attached is a picture of the table that has pride of place in my home. My sentimental soul can rest now that the documents are back with your family.

I was delighted to receive these documents and so touched by the kindness of strangers, both Nazeth and Pierre, in seeking out a family member who would cherish them.

The documents turned out to be of great interest to me. One of them was a formal letter from the Governor of the Orange River Colony, Sir Hamilton John Goold-Adams, appointing Julius Katz as Justice of the Peace and Mayor of Fauresmith in 1910. It was signed by the Attorney General. Another was the declaration that Julius signed in 1902 in which he pledged allegiance to King Edward VII, thus allowing him to return to South Africa from the POW camp in Ceylon at the end of the Boer War. One side of the declaration was printed in English and the other side in Dutch, the language used for legal matters prior to Afrikaans.

There was also Julius’s Union of South Africa passport with a playing card with the logo of the Union Castle shipping line as a bookmark in it. When I looked at the pages of the passport, I found that some of the stamps and writing were in Cyrillic script which I couldn’t read and some of the writing was in old German cursive script which was hard to decipher. So I enlisted my son Adam to put the transcription and translation tasks to Claude[3], the artificial intelligence model, developed by Anthropic, the company he works for. Claude did an excellent job! The passport was issued in 1928, before Julius moved back to Germany with his sister Johanna in 1929. It states that he was a “British Subject by virtue of having been a burgher of the late Orange Free State Republic.” It shows a photo of him and states that he was a merchant born in Germany in 1875. It lists his height as 5 foot 7 inches. The passport itself is interesting because it shows that Julius traveled quite extensively in Europe. As South Africa was still, at that time, a member of the British Empire, it entitled the holder to travel anywhere within the Empire, as well as to all European countries and the USA. The stamps in it show that he traveled to Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Italy and Switzerland. It also lists letters of credit from the Credit Bank of Kassel to banks in the various countries he visited. Presumably these were to enable him to obtain funds in the local currencies. As far as I know, Julius had retired, prior to leaving for Germany, so he was probably traveling for pleasure, but it’s possible that he was also doing business in some of the countries he visited. Whether his sister Johanna accompanied him on these trips I don’t know but, as they were very close, it seems likely that she did. Another point of historical interest is that the passport includes a “Certificate of Registration” from the British Consulate, dated March 27^th, 1933, certifying that Julius was a British Subject and Protected Person. Presumably this was required to exempt him from the anti-Jewish laws being passed after Hitler came to power. An immigration stamp shows that he left Germany for South Africa for good in 1936.

So here ends the tale of the kindness and affection of two brothers whom fate placed on opposite sides in two wars and of the kindness of two strangers who reunited the found documents of one of those brothers with a grateful family member.

[1] Louis Rabinowitz Papers

[2] Translated from German by my cousin Vicki Sussens-Messerer

[3] Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model