Council Bluffs woman, 98, worked to educate others about Holocaust
Holocaust survivor Kitty Williams, right, talks in 2017 at Ralston High School about her time in Auschwitz
Katherine "Kitty" Williams through the years. From left, Williams as a 10-year-old in her passport photo, as a young adult a few years after World War II and in a recent photo.
Holocaust survivor Katherine “Kitty” Williams busied herself with raising a family after coming to the U.S. in 1947 and marrying a Council Bluffs man, who discouraged her from talking about her experiences in a German concentration camp.
"My father told her on the train (from New York) to Council Bluffs that his family was bigoted," said her son, Mark Peters of New York. "He said it was not a good idea to let them know that she was Jewish.
"It was rough," Peters said. "She basically went from one anti-Semitic society to another."
Williams died Sunday in her home at age 98. Her family will receive visitors from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday at Hoy-Kilnoski Funeral Home, 1221 N. 16th St., Council Bluffs. An 11 a.m. graveside service will be held Friday at Walnut Hill Cemetery, 1350 E. Pierce St., Council Bluffs.
Katherine "Kitty" Williams
In some ways, Peters said, it was a relief for his mother to not talk about the horrors she had endured. She opened up more after divorcing her husband, who Peters said was an abusive alcoholic.
Williams later married another Council Bluffs man, Bill Williams. She accepted his proposal only after telling him that she was Jewish.
"My stepfather said, 'So what?' and my mother was able to acknowledge her identity," said Peters, who is gay. "She later told my partner, 'So that's what it's like coming out of the closet!'"
Williams, who grew up as Katherine Ehrenfeld in Sarand, Hungary, went on to speak about her experiences dozens of times. She has been honored by the Institute for Holocaust Education in Omaha and the Iowa Holocaust Memorial in Des Moines.
“I was silent for so many years,” Williams told The World-Herald in 2017. “It’s my only regret. But I will try my best to make up for it.”
In her Holocaust presentations, Williams said that she and her father were forced onto a train bound for Auschwitz in June 1944. Her first night there, she smelled burning flesh and heard screams of people begging for their lives.
She got the chance to work in a German munitions camp, where conditions were slightly better. As the Allies came closer, the Nazis planned to send the workers to another camp to be gassed, but Williams and about two dozen female workers escaped when the guards abandoned them. Starving, they ate grass until units from the U.S. Army arrived.
“You look back on it, and you think it can’t happen,” she said during an interview. “In everything, I was so fortunate. I don’t know why I was picked to be alive.”
Her father died in Auschwitz, and a brother died as a forced laborer in Russia, but Williams' five siblings survived the war.
About 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. More than 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz.
In Iowa, Williams worked on her first husband's farm but later got a job at a bank and worked her way up to vice president. She raised three children, one of whom later died. Bill Williams died in 2012.
“I didn’t really get the full story (of her experiences) until later on,” Peters said. “I remember her telling us about arriving (at a camp) and seeing her reflection in a window for the first time in a long time. She was startled because she was only 20 years old, her head was shaved and she was very gaunt.”
Kitty Williams returned to Europe multiple times and spoke often about her Holocaust experiences.
“You just feel like you don’t have much time left,” she said in the 2017 interview. “I just hope that my health holds out so that I can keep on talking. I benefit more out of it than the people I’m talking to because I have the satisfaction that they’re informed, that they know it really happened.”
Williams’ daughter, Pamela Peters, who also lives in New York, said her mother also recalled the good people she had met, including members of a Christian family in her hometown who helped hide her early in the war.
“Basically, she felt like there were always good people, and she was so thankful,” Pamela Peters said. “She was particularly thankful for the people who helped her and her family during the Holocaust.”
Williams’ voice will continue to be heard in a video recorded when she spoke in Omaha on Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2019.
