In a few days, Piri Katz will celebrate her 98th birthday. That alone is a milestone worth celebrating. However, the fact that she was once known only as 20,444, makes this birthday especially gratifying.
Piri was the seventh of 11 children born into an orthodox Jewish family who lived in then Czechoslovakia’s Carpathian Mountains in a small town called Tibiva. Her parents owned two flour mills, and their property was filled with horses, geese, chickens, and all kinds of fruit orchards.
The simple life in Tibiva was farming, school, religious studies (for the boys), observing the Sabbath and other Jewish holidays where family and friends would gather at the local synagogue.
Then Hitler came, bringing death and destruction in his path.
On Passover Eve, 1944, the Nazis burst into Piri’s home and took the entire family (along with other Jews in the community) to the Munkatch ghetto. (A brother and sister had emigrated to America years earlier.) It wasn’t a ghetto such as the Warsaw Ghetto, which was in a blocked off residential area. It was a brick factory that had no facilities to handle the multitude of people forced to sit or lie on hard bricks or in the streets awaiting transportation by cattle car to work or death camps. Bored Nazis filled their days watching Jews die of illness or starvation or for “fun” would beat and rape helpless Jews.
According to the National World War II Museum:
The Nazis created at least 44,000 camps, including ghettos and other sites of incarceration, between 1933 and 1945. The camps served various functions, from imprisoning "enemies of the state" to serving as way stations in larger deportation schemes to murdering people in gas chambers.
A few weeks later, Piri arrived at Auschwitz and became a number: 20,444. (By this point in the war, many death camps had stopped tattooing and restarted numbers.) Her head was shaved, and she was given a filthy prison gown to wear. No bra or underwear, just a lice-infested striped gown.
Most readers know about Nazi brutality, often supported by local citizens who despised Jews. Those who weren’t immediately shoved into gas chambers worked long days on starvation rations, never knowing from one minute to the next if they would survive to see the sunset.
When the Holocaust was over in 1945, Piri had been imprisoned at Auschwitz, Geislingen, and finally liberated by the US Army in Dachau. Europe was a devastated mess. There was no home to return to. Moreover, there were still many Europeans who hated Hitler but secretly (or maybe not so secretly) wished he had finished the job regarding the Jewish question. Perhaps it’s not much different than today.
The Holocaust inferno took most of Piri’s family except for a brother and two sisters. She would spend the next five years in a displaced persons camp.
Piri’s aunt Helen, who had emigrated to the United States before the war regularly submitted affidavits supporting her arrival and confirming Piri was not a communist, would have a job and place to live and not depend on the government for her basic needs.
Compare that to the millions of illegal aliens who waltzed across the border throughout Joe Biden’s four miserable years in the White House. Or how today Democrats staunchly support illegal aliens – many criminals – who have circumvented our immigration laws and immediately apply for all kinds of government assistance.
Arriving in the Oak Park suburb of Detroit, Michigan Piri toiled all day working as a seamstress in a factory that made drapes and bedspreads. After long days, she attended night school to learn our US Constitution and to read and write English. There weren't any “press 2 for ____” options.
Becoming a proud American citizen was one of the happiest days of Piri’s 98 years!
While Piri was barely surviving in Hitler’s death camps, her future husband Milton was part of the Greatest Generation fighting in the Third Army where he was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. Like many patriotic Americans, Milton had enlisted following Pearl Harbor. After the war, he became a physician. Piri and Milton met in 1956, quickly fell in love and married.
As she turns 98 years young, she has been blessed with four daughters, eight grandchildren and two great grandsons. Piri always says, “I beat Hitler. I’m still here.”
There are approximately 220,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide. Within the next decade, 90 percent of the remaining Holocaust survivors will die. Of those still with us, like Piri, they believed antisemitism had died with the Reich or at least had been greatly reduced, especially in western nations. But Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel has apparently opened the doors for a rabid rise in Jew hatred.
What is most concerning is that while the Democrat Party embraces Jew hatred, it is also showing up in the Republican Party. Although they don't wear a keffiyah, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, to name three, make antisemitic comments that just a few years ago would have tossed them out of conservative circles.
Piri is a staunch Donald Trump supporter. During a 2018 Holocaust Remembrance at Cypress College, California, she said:
“For those who have never lost their freedom they cannot appreciate what real freedom is—there is nothing more precious to a human being in this life than to have freedom. It breaks my heart when I see young people on college campuses desecrating the American flag, athletes refusing to stand for the national anthem or people refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance. I worry about the rise throughout the world of antisemitism & the BDS movement. It hurts me when people propagandize against the USA, and disrespect our military, under whose blanket of freedom we are all protected each and every day.
“I am forever grateful that we have President Donald Trump, who not only respects our military, but is a true friend to the State of Israel. When I was in Dachau, I never would have dreamed that I would live to see the 70th anniversary of the State of Israel and that an American president would finally be moving the US Embassy to Israel’s eternal capital of Jerusalem.
“To those who seek socialism, communism, or ideologies that seek to destroy our United States Constitution and the values that our country stands for, to them I say you should kiss the ground that you walk on in the United States of America, and if not, America IS a FREE country and YOU are FREE to LEAVE.
“Yet, to all of those who feel as I do that we are so blessed to live in this free country of the United States of America where we have the opportunity to thrive, live in freedom and pursue happiness, we owe you my precious hero and all of the United States military our eternal thanks.”
Happy 98th birthday Piri! If you would like to email birthday wishes to Piri, send to me at
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Robin M. Itzler is a regular contributor to American Thinker. She is the founder and editor of Patriot Neighbors, a free weekly national newsletter and can be reached at
