Carol "Lenka" Katz, who survived the Nazi persecutions in Slovakia with an assumed identity and with assistance from Christian friends who hid her and her baby son, died July 6 of complications from an infection at a hospital in Jerusalem. The former Northwest Baltimore resident was 95.
Carol Leah Bernstein was born into a Hasidic family in Bardiov, a small town in eastern Slovakia, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
After graduating from high school and a business school, she went to work as a secretary for an industrial firm in Bratislava.
"She was very popular with her employers and fellow workers, a fact that helped save her life during the Holocaust," said a son, David Katz of Northwest Baltimore.
"During the Second World War, she lived through the anti-Semitic persecutions in the independent fascist state of Slovakia, which was allied to Hitler," her son said.
"Because of her important job in an industrial firm, she was exempted from some of the worst persecutions, particularly in 1942, when many Slovakian Jews were deported to the Auschwitz extermination camps," he said.
In 1943, she was married to Dr. Ivan Levinger, a physician, and a year later a son, Ari, was born.
After the German army swept into Slovakia in 1944 and occupied the country, it began the systematic deportation and extermination of the country's Jewish population.
Mrs. Katz went into hiding when several Christian friends offered her and her baby a refuge, while another family took in her husband.
But her husband's hosts surrendered him to the SS, and he was executed. Her host family, fearful of the consequences if they were discovered harboring Jews, then asked her to leave.
"Then began a series of adventures, as mother and child ran from pillar to post in the last 10 months of the war, desperately endeavoring to stay one step ahead of the German and Slovakian authorities," Mr. Katz said.
Using a false identity, Mrs. Katz and her young son lived in the Slovak city of Bratislava, where they were helped by two sisters, Paula and Terka Illik, who were German Roman Catholics.
"They were opposed to Hitler on religious grounds and repeatedly risked their lives to hide her," Mr. Katz said.
When the authorities began to close in on Mrs. Katz, a Christian pediatrician found a place for her and her son in a retirement home operated by a religious order in Stara Tura in western Slovakia, near the Czech border.
