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Here is a chronological look at some of the issues and actions in Holocaust reparations

By Jo Sandin of the Journal Sentinel staff March 21, 1999
c Copyright 1999, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. All rights reserved.




Restitution for Holocaust is symbolic

By Jo Sandin of the Journal Sentinel staff March 21, 1999

A bit of justice The pursuit of reparations for the Holocaust always has been more about healing than money, said Greg Schneider, director of institutional allocation of the Claims Conference, a non-profit agency founded in 1951 to seek restitution. "I have not heard of any discussion of any settlement which includes compensation that even begins to approach the financial loss of the victims and of the survivors," he said.

  • With death imminent for many survivors, the present outburst of activity is an attempt to establish moral responsibility for some of the plundering that accompanied the persecution of Jews under the Hitler regime, Schneider said.
    "What I find surprising," he said, "is that even at this stage, even confronted with the evidence we have been able to compile, there are still companies unwilling to accept responsibility for their actions."
    There is a desperate urgency about recent efforts, he said, because of the age and poverty of tens of thousands of survivors around the world.
    "There are elderly needy widows living in the Ukraine and Belarus who literally are starving," he said.
    Even in the United States there are needy survivors, he said. In addition to the problems common to all who are poor and elderly, these survivors have the psychological problems of those who have come through the greatest catastrophe of the century.
    "In the immediate postwar era, at least they had a future to look forward to," he said. "At this stage, they are plagued with memories of what they have lost."
    In the face of that bleak prelude to death, Schneider said, "We are trying to create a little bit of a sense of justice, as impossible as that seems, considering the injustice that the Holocaust itself embodies."
    -- Jo Sandin

    For survivors of Nazi concentration camps and slave labor factories, liberation arrived with Allied troops in 1945.
    Restitution for their losses, even token symbolic restitution, is taking considerably longer.
    As more companies are accused of profiting from Hitler's persecution of the Jews or of betraying the trust of Jewish customers or depositors, more announce the creation of funds addressing the claims of Holocaust survivors, and of heirs of the 6 million victims and of 7 million slave laborers forced to work in German plants.
    What do members of Milwaukee's Jewish community think about the ongoing litigation? Does the quest for reparations heal wounds or prevent healing?
    Those interviewed for this article suggest that the proper question is not why the pursuit of restitution continues. Instead, they say, people should be asking why it has taken so long to bring to justice some who profited from the persecution of Jews.
    "Why did it take 50 years to make these inquiries?" asked Gerard Friedenfeld, who was one of 10,000 children -- mostly Jewish -- who were rescued from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to England in the children's transport movement before World War II. "Why did it take the Swiss so long to come forward?"
    Jews who lived through the Holocaust emerged from one of history's greatest horrors with nothing, said Sylvia Blasberg, of Milwaukee, a Holocaust survivor.
    "We came out with just the pain," she said. "We made new lives for ourselves, by ourselves, to prove to Hitler that he did not destroy us completely."
    When Blasberg returned on foot from behind Russian lines to her home city in eastern Poland, everyone she had known and loved was gone. Her uncle's house, still standing and, she could tell, still furnished as she remembered, was occupied by strangers who would not even let her through the door.
    In 1949, with the help of Jewish Family Services, she found a home in Milwaukee.
    Until last month, she never had received a cent of restitution. Then Blasberg received her only token that someone who profited from the Holocaust had acknowledged her loss. It was a check for $500 from a Swiss bank fund.
    A check from a Swiss bank also arrived for William Neufeld last month, the day after he died.
    "It was a minimum amount," said his daughter Sandra Hoffman, "but I'm sure he would have been pleased to see it."
    Hoffman has worked with her own organization, the Generation After, and with the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation project, sponsored by Steven Spielberg, in videotaping the memories of survivors, including her father and her late mother, Franka Mermelstein Neufeld. Hoffman said the film project was one way of acknowledging the Holocaust, and reparations were another.
    "Because we're in a society that looks upon money in the way it does," she said, "it is a concrete way that people can feel that something is being done, that someone finally realizes that a great injustice -- and that is not even an adequate word in this context -- has been perpetrated by a whole group of people."
    Confiscated Jewish assets remain an issue of serious concern, according to Paula Simon, executive director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations.
    Restitution is more a matter of morals than of finance, she said.
    "There isn't going to be a significant amount of money," said Simon, "but people just want a sense that there has been a return, however small, of what is rightly theirs."
    Survivors in former iron curtain countries such as the Ukraine and Belarus never have received reparations, she said, and these survivors now face extreme poverty at the end of their lives.
    "We cannot delay," Simon said of reparation payments. "We can't spend 25 or 30 more years negotiating the issues. These fragile survivors are running out of time."
    It is vital that those responsible be called to account, even if the reckoning takes place after more than 50 years, said Rabbi Steven Adams, president of the Wisconsin Council of Rabbis and educator at Congregation Beth Israel of Glendale.
    "There is an issue of responsibility and culpability that will not disappear," he said. "It's not going to change what happened in the past. Placing responsibility isn't designed to do that. Rather, it is to make sure that (the wrong) doesn't happen again."
    Discovering the extent of culpability, he said, is a salutary lesson for everyone.
    "Hitler could never have succeeded if other people hadn't selfishly found some gain in his course of action for themselves," Adams said. "Those who took the pieces of art, those companies which took the money are in many ways as responsible (for the Holocaust) as the leaders of the Nazi movement, because they placed property and gain above human life."
    Milwaukeean Judy Mann lived in Israel from 1990 to 1997, when she returned to become president of Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin.
    "I think, when trying to come to terms with an enormity like the Holocaust, we have certain obligations," said Mann. "The Holocaust was perpetrated by a variety of different kinds of people -- a small number who were the actual perpetrators (the concentration camp guards or Nazi officers) and the vast majority who were bystanders." Discoveries about the extent of wartime collaboration demand a new understanding of the word "bystander," she said.
    "It starts becoming clear that whole groups were involved in ways in which they profited by causing enormous pain and suffering beyond what we have words for," Mann said. "I do personally think we should be going to court. Why should the base of these corporations and banks be built on the backs of people who endured enormous suffering?"
    Mann suggested that the culpability of those "bystanders" who cooperated in the Holocaust could be realized more fully by considering those courageous few who refused.
    She spoke of the people of Denmark who, without formal organization, managed to smuggle to freedom in Sweden all but 472 of the country's Jews and to welcome survivors back after the war to homes preserved in their absence.
    "Of course we are still dealing with the Holocaust," said Mordecai Lee, assistant professor of governmental affairs for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Outreach and Continuing Education Division. "This was a momentous event in human history."
    After all, only last year did the United States government pay restitution for its actions toward Japanese-Americans, he said.
    He said, "It is surprising that only today is the process of exacting restitution working its way down the list to corporations and banks."
    Even though Lee was born and raised in Milwaukee, he attended junior and senior high school in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Tel Aviv, where he saw Jews bearing concentration camp tattoos surviving on small reparation payments.
    Lee said the principle of restitution was not a novel idea, but a common practice in dealing with traumatic events.
    "It baffles me when people raise the question in principle," he said. "I don't think that a criminal should be let off the hook because there are no heirs."
    Discovering the extent of the Swiss bank involvement in profiting from the Holocaust was a shock to Jeanette Peckerman, even though both her mother, Rose Chrustowski, and her late father Arthur Chrustowski, were victims of Nazi persecution.
    "It was such an insult," she said, to find that Swiss banks had withheld deposits from heirs of survivors and laundered Nazi gold.
    "I wouldn't want people to think that this (reparations quest) was about money," said Peckerman. "It is about finding some sort of justice for the financial crimes committed. It's about holding financial institutions accountable for their actions."
    Peckerman worries that victims will be "twisted into being the bad guys."
    When news of Swiss bank involvement first broke, she said, people were shocked. "Now we're discovering that all sorts of different corporations had dirty hands," she said, "and people don't want to hear it any more. Yet those corporate hands get dirtier every day."
    Stephen Chernof, president of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, said, "The world really needs to remember what happened and needs to try its best not to allow anything like what happened to occur again."
    Chernof, a lawyer, wanted to dispel the notion that the suits were motivated by attorneys' quest for profit.
    "It is my understanding that many of these suits are being done on a pro bono basis," he said.
    Without commenting on any particular suit, Chernof said, "It's hideous that the appropriation of property which occurred (during the Holocaust) is only being discovered now. People with supposedly clean hands don't have anything near clean hands."
    Greed made collaborators of many, he said.
    "The horrors weren't limited to the concentration camps," Chernof said. "While there were many people who did all they could to help a lot of the people who were persecuted, there were also an enormous number who simply went along and tolerated what was going on. That doesn't mean I think they were all evil people, but they did allow evil to happen."
    c Copyright 1999, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. All rights reserved.


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