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Love story rises from the embers

World War II veteran pens memoir on how 57-year relationship began and blossomed.

Staff photo by Linda Weisenborn Arthur Katz is overcome with emotion while reading excerpts from his book , "From The Embers Rising", which describe his meeting and marriage to Anneliese, his wife of 55 years.

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Photos: Local writes memoir about wife

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By Eric Schwartzberg, Staff Writer Updated 5:04 PM Thursday, July 2, 2009

Arthur Katz knows being injured during World War II was for the best.

Earning the Purple Heart led him to the heart of Anneliese Baur, the woman who became the love of his life.

Katz, 86, of Deerfield Twp., was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., and gave up his college student draft deferment to enlist in the U.S Cavalry in 1942. Injuries he sustained in August 1944 and February 1945 led to his reassignment to a small village in the Black Forest of Germany.

That’s where in June 1945, the Jewish G.I. met Anneliese Baur, a German-Protestant who worked as a chef at a military government post.

“She was standing outside and the sun behind her created an aura of light around her,” Katz said. “The moment I turned the corner and saw her, I fell in love with her instantly. The first thought in my mind was ... ’I’m going to marry that woman.’ ”

Together, the unlikely duo forged an enduring love that weathered prejudice, created a family of five children and lasted beyond Anneliese’s death in 2002.

Looking to tell their story, Katz poured his heart out into the recently published “From The Embers Rising,” a 780-page memoir published in April.

“(The book) was very cathartic for me,” he said. “I wrote it crying all the time. I cried bitterly.”

Katz describes his wife as wonderful, wise, courageous and forgiving, with a calm personality and a knack for seeing the positive aspects of any situation, no matter how daunting.

His home is filled with reminders of their nearly six-decade relationship, including symbolic paintings and colorful, elaborate mosaics Katz created before and after Anneliese’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

“She was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said.

A love story

In “From The Embers Rising,” Katz tells the story of being a U.S. soldier in World War II, how he met Anneliese, and how their love blossomed at a time the world was still smoldering from strife.

The book includes a sampling of the 700 love letters between the improbable sweethearts. In a September 1945 letter, Anneliese attempts to assuage Katz’s’ parents upon the news that the two intended to marry.

“I am sorry if I have made you unhappy, but you must believe me that everything will be all right. I love Arthur so, so very much, please love me a little,” Anneliese wrote, slipping back in German syntax, before finishing the letter in German, in which Katz’s mother was fluent.

“My love for Arthur is something holy, the entire substance of my life and we are both so happy with each other,” Anneliese wrote. “Please, please, do not destroy our happiness.”

“What a beautiful letter,” Katz said. “She points out that religions should not be a war between people when they love each other, that every nation has good and bad people and that she suffered as much at home in Germany (because of Nazi party restrictions) as she did from the (Allied) bombing.”

Anneliese, who lived less than 25 miles from the border between Germany and Switzerland, wanted to attend a Swiss culinary school but would not compromise her principles to do so.

“The German government wouldn’t give her an exit visa unless she joined the Nazi party and she refused to do that,” Katz of Deerfield Twp. said.

What Anneliese did end up joining was the Jewish people, the very nation the Nazis sought to destroy.

Katz’s grandfather had only two questions for his grandson before he gave his blessing.

“He asked me ‘Do you love her?’ I said, ‘Of course I do!’ And then he says to me, ‘Does she love you?’ I said, ‘Of course, zeyda (grandfather).’ He says ‘Good. We lost six million (Jews during the Holocaust), we’ll get one back.’ ”

The couple’s marriage in February 1947 drew a considerable crowd.

“Every rabbi in the neighborhood must have been there (at the wedding) because it was a big conversion,” Katz said.

As a convert, Anneliese understood Judaism more than most people born into the religion.

“All my relatives used to call her up at the High Holidays saying ‘How do you do this? How do you do that?’ and she would tell them,” Katz said.

Katz and Anneliese had five children, one of whom wrote “A Daughter’s Letter” for the book’s introduction, which contains the first mention of Alzheimer’s — the disease that slowly took Anneliese from Katz.

Reading it aloud while sitting at his kitchen table, Katz could not contain his tears.

“I saved the box as instructed ... and when my mother had all but disappeared from this world but for her body, amid the anguish of my father’s panic and denial and despair, I remembered the box, as if it might somehow hold, vessel-like, an essence of my mother,” Katz’s daughter wrote. “In the wake of our mother’s death, we children encourage our father ... to deal with his intense ... level of grief and mourning by writing down some of the many stories that began to pour forth from him, as if from a fount that could not be held back.”

Katz is hoping those stories allow readers to get an inkling of the wonderful woman who was his wife.

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