At 103, Holocaust survivor and longtime Cantabrigian Kitty Haas is not ready to die

Using her walker, a small woman plods into the dining room at The Cambridge Homes. Her undereyes sag, affecting an illusion that she is constantly looking up. When she finally reaches the table, she is heaving for air, grunting a little. Still her physical struggle seems shockingly minimal upon the realization that she is nearly 103 years old. Her name is Kitty Haas. 

Beside her at the assisted living facility’s dining table is Daniel Fireside, or Stephanie Reiss, or Fouzia Raza, or another member of Team Kitty, a group of friends and community members who accompany Haas at her daily meals. If it weren’t for Team Kitty, Haas would have to move to a different nursing home with less independence. 

This past year, Haas lost her eyesight due to glaucoma, making it difficult for her to navigate her plate, and The Cambridge Homes is unable to provide a helper for all of Haas’s meals. For the last eight months, every single day, for every lunch and dinner, a member of Team Kitty has come to The Cambridge Homes and sat with Haas for her meal, keeping her company and redirecting her spoon when needed. At these meals, new team members have fallen for Haas’s sharp charm, and old friends have been repeatedly reminded of the woman they adore. 

After over a century of life, Haas has good days and bad days. On good days, her incredibly intact memory shines as she tells stories about her childhood in Austria, her escape from the Holocaust, and her career as a designer and businesswoman. Even on a bad day, she may just need to enjoy her beloved coffee ice cream before she animates.

Fighting the Nazis in Austria

Haas, an only child, was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, on August 27, 1923. Haas remembers her childhood in Austria before the Nazis fondly, and her summers at her grandparents’ villa in Trenčín, Slovakia. 

Before the war, Haas felt that Austria “was the center of Europe.” After the war, she said, “it became this poor little Austria.”

In 1939, her father was going to be sent to a labor camp and Haas, only a teenager, advocated to save him. 

“I fought the Nazis in the Austrian courts when I was 15,” Haas said. 

She found a doctor who was willing to write a note for her father stating that he was too ill to be sent. 

“Gestapo never got my father,” she said. “Or I wouldn’t be here.”

Haas remembers frightening her father by going outside on Kristallnacht to witness the pogroms unfolding around her.

Family members in the States were unwilling to support Haas and her parents’ escape. Ultimately, the friend of a distant relative agreed to sponsor their passage to the U.S.

In 1940, Haas and her family sailed to New York City on the Conte di Savoia, an Italian cruise liner. “There were 600 escapees and 300 rich Americans who tried to get out of Europe,” Haas recalled. “It was probably the last Italian ship before the war.” Indeed, Mussolini joined the war on June 10, two weeks after Haas’s ship arrived in New York on May 23rd, and that was the end of the Italian escape route. 

Haas returned to Austria once, as an adult. “I couldn’t find anybody,” she said. “Even my non-Jewish friends were gone.” 

The ostrich hat

“When I first came to the States, I lived in Greenwich Village,” Haas said. “And The Village was still the real Village. Lots of artists, painters, sculptors, writers.”

When Haas was 17, she designed a hat for a wealthy salon owner with many famous clients. “I made this hat, which was out of suede, but it looked like an ostrich feather,” Haas said. “And it was a hit.” 

“Even though lots of places wanted to hire her, she insisted on having her own business, and set up a little shop out of her apartment in Greenwich Village,” Fireside said.

That was the beginning of Haas’s long career as a designer and business woman. In the 1950s, Haas moved to Cambridge and opened a store in Harvard Square.

A Harvard Crimson article from April, 1964, calls her “irrepressible” and reads: “Bubbling over with her usual enthusiasm, Kitty breathlessly speaks of the ‘mad, wild things’ she is selling in her new shop on 42a Brattle Street. (A fire on Dec. 31st destroyed everything, so she has begun again from scratch.) Kitty prides herself on her fabrics, imported from the oddest countries. What she calls her ‘new, darling designs’ turn out to be merely a modified and more sophisticated A-line. She has a shepherdess’s dress complete with plunge which should be interesting. Kitty and her ‘fantastic seamstress’ will make you a cotton dress ($25) in ten days.”

Over the course of her career, Haas operated stores in Nantucket, Mass., Newport, RI, and St. Johns, USVI. She closed her last shop, a jewelry store in the Porter Exchange building, when she was in her late nineties. 

“I combed the world for unusual stuff,” Haas said of her many travelling adventures in search of materials for her designs. 

Reiss, a member of Team Kitty, remembers Haas’s Porter Square jewelry store as full of objects from Haas’s travels to Turkey, South America, Mexico, and parts of Asia. “Very, you know, esoteric kind of stuff,” Reiss said.

“She used to travel in Mexico by herself, off into the highlands, before there was a big tourist industry, and she was hunting down fabrics and folk art,” Fireside said. 

One memory from her travels resonates with Haas today: “It was very hot in Mexico. And there was one little place with a bush that gave some shade. And under it was a rock. And a Mexican lady was sitting on that rock in the shade. She looked at me, she got up, she dusted the rock and showed her hand for me to sit down.” Haas said. “I’ll never forget that.” 

Forming Team Kitty

Reiss met Haas in 1987, when Reiss was a graduate student. Reiss studied in a cafe in the Porter Exchange building where Kitty came in to buy chocolates. They started talking, and they have been great friends ever since. Today, Reiss takes Haas to all of her medical appointments. 

She’s “a family member to me,” Reiss said. Haas never had any children, and her longtime partner, Simeon, died several decades ago. 

A few years ago, Reiss started what she called “Team Kitty,” a group of friends who would volunteer their time to keep Haas company. Raza and Fireside are both active support members, visiting The Cambridge Homes often to see their friend. 

Raza met Haas in 2021 when she was an undergraduate student at Harvard. Her friend had started a nonprofit that connected college students with seniors living in the area, and Raza was paired with Haas. At the time, Haas was 98. 

“She knew how to use Zoom,” Raza said. The pair began getting to know each other on these virtual calls. “My dad had passed away from COVID,” Raza said. “She provided me [with] so much support at that time.”

“She’s just a very, very funny, very, very brutally honest, and oftentimes stubborn lady,” Raza said. 

“She has this type of energy that just kind of attracts very kind hearted people,” Raza said. “Every single friend that I’ve met of hers is willing to be her friend forever.”

Fireside met Haas a little over a year ago. “What’s astonishing is [that] her memory is extraordinary,” Fireside said. “We chat about her childhood in Vienna, her adventures in America and Cambridge, and starting stores.”

Two weekends ago, Fireside, Raza, and Reiss were among 40 or so friends celebrating Kitty’s upcoming birthday, which is on August 27 

“She was very insistent on getting a cake, a chocolate cake with chocolate ganache from Quebrada Bakery,” Fireside said, confirming a point Reiss also made about Haas’s love of chocolate. “We had chocolates brought from her favorite Greenwich Village chocolate shop.” 

“At first, I thought I was just the only crazy person enchanted by this wonderful little woman,” Fireside said. But at her birthday party, “I found myself in a room full of people who have known her for decades, and also share my affinity,” he said. 

Raza gave a speech at the birthday party. “Kitty, I truly believe that God kept you alive this long for us to meet in this life,” Raza said. 

A remarkable will to live

To the question of whether or not she was afraid to die, Haas gave a dry laugh and said, “Well, I’m not looking forward to it.”

“She’s accepted aging,” Reiss said. “She just wants to… keep herself healthy. And she has no interest in dying.”

“She’s an old woman who is excited to continue living forever,” Raza said.

“Her spirit is just to keep going and keep connecting with people,” Fireside said. 

Reflecting on how she got to 103, Haas said, “Is it good luck or bad luck? I don’t know.”

“I lived my life trying not to harm anybody knowingly,” she said.

Her advice after a century of living is: “Try to do only good deeds. Don’t do anything bad, because it’ll come back to you.”

“Only do the right thing, even if it’s difficult,” she added. 

“When people ask her… ‘what’s your secret?’ She’s like, ‘I did what I wanted,’” Reiss said. “‘I enjoyed my life. I enjoyed my day every day.’”

New volunteers to spend mealtimes with Haas are always welcome. Anyone interested should contact Daniel Fireside at dfireside@gmail.com.

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