Kahan family papers

Kathlin Feuerstein was born Katalin Kahan, in Budapest, Hungary, on 3 February 1943, the daughter of Jenö (also known as Eugene, born 1908?) and Gizella (née Berkowicz, nee 1908) Kahan. Her father was originally from Munkacs, and owned a wholesale cutlery business in Budapest, and her mother and grandmother, Hannah Berkowicz, own a factory that produced paper goods. At the time when she was born, her father had been sent to a forced labor camp, after having hidden in Budapest. Although the family had received safe-conduct passes from Raoul Wallenberg’s office, they chose not to resettle in one of the “Jewish” houses, but lived in a number of different places around Budapest. During her infancy, Katalin was taken to the countryside, to live with one of the family’s housekeepers, and her half-sister, Mariana Racz, was hidden with a group of nuns. The family was reunited around December 1944.

By 1948, Jenö and Gizella decided that they wanted to immigrate to the United States, initially obtaining visas for Paraguay, where they had hoped to stay while working on obtaining American visas. Instead, however, they travelled to the United States, where Gizella's brother, Leslie Berk, was living after having immigrated in the 1930s and married an American worman. The Kahans used visitor visas, which they overstayed illegally. Once that had happened, Leslie’s American wife, Lillian, contacted her brother in Rhode Island, who was friends with the United States Senator from that state, Theodore Green, who in turn sponsored legislation in the Senate that would allow the Kahans to stay in the United States, which they were ultimately successful in doing, with Jenö and Gizella becoming citizens in 1960. The family, after initially living in Cleveland near Leslie’s family, moved to Los Angeles, where Jenö worked as a salesman, while Gizella worked as a baker and caterer.