United States citizens in Portugal welcomed their new ambassador this year. But who is Allan Katz and what does he think about some of today’s issues affecting Americans living and working here? The former Tallahassee city commissioner, lawyer and lobbyist, who helped run Barack Obama’s Florida campaign, wants Portugal and the United States to be partners in joint ventures in Portuguese-speaking markets. But Chris Graeme found out about the ambassador’s surprising family background.
Children of the Holocaust survivors
United States Ambassador to Portugal, Allan Katz, is a softly spoken, mild mannered man who comes across as modest yet piercingly intelligent.
To many people, he is the embodiment of the American dream. The son of German Jews of Lithuanian descent who made a success of things in the land of the free that has welcomed so many immigrants over the last two centuries.
But behind the success story is a family struggle against humiliation, oppression, racism and expulsion. His family endured considerable hardship in Nazi Germany before World War II. Although his family’s story is by no means unique, it is a poignant reminder of how the freedoms we take for granted were viciously taken away in a not so distant time and place.
Allan Katz’s father had to leave school aged 14 because the Nazis closed Jewish schools as part of their gradual racist policy aimed at stripping the Jews of their civil liberties and citizenship.
“There was a kind of systemic dehumanisation of the Jews; it wasn’t as though from day one they were all sent off to camps. Little by little all of these things relating to citizenship were stripped away,” he explained.
In early November 1938, the Government announced that Jewish children could no longer attend State elementary schools and all Jewish cultural activities and newspapers were banned.
“By November 1938, when my father was 18 and the anti-Jewish progrom ‘Kristallnacht’ (The Night of the Broken Glass) occurred, my father and grandfather were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp.”
There, 30,000 Jewish men of all ages were interned for three months and 2,000 died of mistreatment and starvation.
“In those days, the German government was still trying to figure out what to do with the Jews and if they could find another country willing to accept them, they could go. My father’s sister’s family living in London agreed to take my father and so he got out. Once Poland was invaded in 1939 that door was closed,” he added.
The family story is that Allan Katz’s father, who was forced to wear the yellow Star of David by the Nazis, found his paperwork was not in order on arrival in London.
“They were holding him on the plane from Germany. The woman from the Jewish Relief Agency, who was A distant relation, marched onto the plane and dragged him off the plane rather than send him back to Germany. She decided he was going to stay in London and that was that,” he said.
His grandfather also managed to get out. The day he was due to leave, the Gestapo arrived to take him away to a camp. He showed them his train ticket and the agent told him that he would be at the station to check and, if he wasn’t boarding that train, he would be taken away.
His aunt and family too, living in Amsterdam, were hidden from the authorities by the same people who concealed Anne Frank and her family.
She was sent to a Czech labour camp but eventually got out and was reunited with her daughter who she had given away to a stranger to look after.
Today her remarkable story is told in the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. When she was 75, she toured America with a former Hitler Youth member who explained what life was like in Nazi Germany and later wrote a book.
On Portugal’s economic situation…
Ambassador Katz insists that Portugal is not in the same boat as Greece, since Portugal is in much better shape having instigated a number of reforms in areas like education and technology since 2005, as well as reducing the number of civil servants, raising the retirement age and having more transparent Government debt figures.
Having said that, “things are FAR from what we would like them to be”.
“The economy is beginning to grow after several years of virtually no growth, but I think that is indicative of a worldwide recession rather than something unique to Portugal. I don’t think Portugal will leave the Euro but I can’t say the same with certainty for one or two other countries.”
Ambassador Katz admits that US businesses operating here would like more business opportunities in Portugal and hears there are “sometimes uncompetitive situations that companies have to deal with”.
“What they want is a level playing field and when we have raised certain issues, the Portuguese government has been very responsive” he says.
However, the advantages were clear for foreign employees working in Portugal in that the country offered an “excellent quality of life” as well as a still untapped potential to access other markets in the world such as Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and other Portuguese speaking countries.
“The key thing is that there are so many pluses and so people want to live here,” he said.
On crime and policing…
“We haven’t had many complaints from United States citizens at the Embassy, although obviously we do hear from and help people who have lost their passports or have been the victims of crime. “Unfortunately this problem, which also exists in other places such as the South of France and Miami in Florida, where there are foreign residents living permanently or in homes that are vacant for parts of the year, is widespread,” he said.
“As far as I know, the police here are working hard to adapt to this new threat and we cooperate well with the Portuguese police but, unfortunately, it’s a tough job and a universal problem, made even worse in these current economic times. If we had some magical words to give them, we would have done so, but we don’t and if there was some technique to avoid this problem it would have been employed.”
Serving the United States community
The American Embassy in Lisbon has been focusing on doing a lot more outreach work for US citizens living in Portugal and particularly the Algarve, including social networking and a lot of public diplomacy by going out into the community for its community of around 20,000 US citizen residents living and working in Portugal.
“We are very aggressive on updating our residents with news and information on our website and use Facebook to let people know what is available and how they can connect with one another. Also, we have a number of different cultural organisations to let Americans know where events are going on and how they can access them,” he said.
There are also a number of educational programmes linked to American universities which have worked very well together with
the Portuguese.
Recently, the American Citizens Services Section launched a Facebook page exclusively for the American and English speaking community as well as a general Embassy Facebook page, which are good ways for US citizens to connect with each other and get information on different types of events.
1″>news
