92-year-old Michael Katz, tenant of the Maanan Nursing Home in Beer Sheva, recovering from the Corona • During the war he worked in a shell-making factory In the Holocaust "

• Michael and the medical team after recovering from the virus // Photo: Soroka spokesmen

92-year-old Michael Katz, a Holocaust survivor, resident of Beersheba, and a resident of the Maanan Nursing Home, faces three weeks ago in a serious condition for a special event for corona patients in Soroka. Michael recovered from the hospital and two days later celebrated his 92nd birthday when he was healthy from the virus, with his family.

"I won and survived the difficult Holocaust that we went through," said Katz, a Holocaust survivor from Moldova, through his niece Luba, who serves as a contact for him due to his hearing difficulties. "In the nursing home, I heard about friends who had a name who passed away from Corona. We went through a difficult time because we were in isolation. I was sure that, as someone who had been through a difficult period in the Holocaust, I would survive any other difficulty in life. "My mental and physical strength, after everything I've been through in the Holocaust. And here I am, alive and breathing and healthy." Dr. Leonid Barsky, one of the doctors who treated him, said that Michael was heading to the special events unit in Soroka after suffering from fever and difficulty breathing.

Michael has been through a lot of hardships in his life. At the outbreak of World War II, he managed to escape to Kazakhstan with his mother and brother, where he joined the war effort and began working in a shell-making factory directed to the Soviet-led war against the Nazis. Years later, Michael moved to Ukraine, married and had two children. In 2005, when he was 78, he immigrated to Israel.

Michael (Misha) Katz was born in 1928, the third of seven siblings, in a small town in Moldova, Telenst, where many Jewish families lived in close proximity to other Moldovan families. When he was 7, his father died during a pogrom carried out by the Moldavans in their Jewish neighbors. "Long before the World War came to Moldova," he recalls, "we suffered greatly from the Moldovans. They had already committed some riots and pogroms to the Jews, and dozens of Jews were massacred.

"The violin was the love of my life"

Michael was 13 when World War II arrived in their hometown with the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941. "We knew that if we did not abandon and flee, we would be murdered in cold blood," he said. Directly bombing German aircraft.

"We were on time to escape, and we wanted to take important and precious things to us. There was no time to take many things. Most importantly, I had to take with me what I loved most, my violin. He was the love of my life and I kept more than anything for him. The brutal and brutal war, our family and many others were on the way .We went through everything during the war - hunger, cold, illness. Not all survived - grandfather and some of the brothers and sisters did not come to distant Kazakhstan. My violin was also destroyed in one of the bombings. For him, but he was lost to the world. "

After arriving at their escape to Kazakhstan, Misha started working in a shell-making factory for guns and tanks, where he worked from the age of 13 until the end of the war. At 21, he married a Jewish woman, Lucia, and they lived happily for 48 years; First in Kazakhstan and then in Ukraine and Russia. In 1996, Michael became a widower, and is now the father of two children and the grandfather of three grandchildren and a great-grandchild. In 2005, she immigrated to Be'er Sheva. Until a year ago, he continued to live a full life - cooking, tidying and repairing the entire house with his gold, and sometimes playing some violin. A few years ago he met a new love - Rita. Last year he fell and broke his pelvis. He underwent two surgeries and a rehabilitation process and finally came to sleep.

His niece Luba says of him: "Everywhere he comes - everyone loves him and receives energy and optimism from him, even in the difficult situations he has been through and undergoes in his life."