NYTimes: Losing Count
By THANE ROSENBAUM
THE Holocaust has always been marked by numbers. There was the numbering
of arms in death camps and the staggering death toll where the words six
million became both a body count and a synonym for an unspeakable crime.
After the Holocaust, Germany performed the necessary long division in
paying token reparations to survivors. More recently, Swiss banks and
European insurance companies have concealed bank account and policy
numbers belonging to dead Jews.
Only with the Holocaust have dehumanization and death been as much a
moral mystery as a tragic game of arithmetic. And the numbers continue,
although now largely in reverse.
After 60 years, Holocaust survivors are inching toward extinction.
According to Ira Sheskin, director of the Jewish Demography Project at
the University of Miami, fewer than 900,000 remain, residing primar ily
in the United States, Israel and the former Soviet Union. Most are in
their 80s and 90s. Unless immediate measures are taken, many of those
who survived the Nazi evil will soon die without a proper measure of
dignity.
According to Dr. Sheskin’s data, more than 87,000 American Holocaust
survivors — roughly half the American total — qualify as poor, meaning
they have annual incomes below $15,000. The United Jewish Communities,
the umbrella organization of the American Jewish Federations, determined
that 25 percent of the American survivors live at or below the official
federal poverty line. (The poverty figure in New York City is even
higher.) Many are without sufficient food, shelter, heat, health care,
medicine, dentures, eyeglasses, even hearing aids.
Conditions worldwide are similar. It’s a sad twist that the teenagers
who mastered the art of survival so long ago have been forced, in their
old age, to call on t heir survival instincts once again.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Although the various global financial
settlements represent only a small fraction of the Jewish property that
was plundered during the Holocaust, they still amount to billions of
dollars. Which raises questions: Why aren’t the funds being used to care
for Holocaust survivors in whose name and for whose benefit these
restitution initiatives were undertaken? Why weren’t survivors permitted
to speak for themselves in the very negotiations that led to the
recovery and distribution of their stolen assets?
Take the Swiss bank settlement, for instance. A federal judge in
Brooklyn distributed 75 percent of the looted assets to survivors in the
former Soviet Union, leaving only 4 percent for destitute survivors in
the United States, even though roughly 20 percent of the world’s
Holocaust survivors live in America. Assets that had been stolen by the
Swiss were onc e again diverted, this time by the charitable inclinations
of a judge who, ignoring the voices of survivors, severed the connection
between the victims of the theft and the proceeds of the recovery.
On the matter of insurance, a federal judge in Manhattan recently
approved a settlement in which fewer than 5 percent of the life
insurance policies that had been sold to Jews would be restituted,
allowing the Italian insurer, Generali, to escape with more than $2
billion in unjust enrichment. By not requiring Generali to disclose the
names of policyholders, the settlement amounts to a cover-up. Tens of
thousands of Holocaust survivors are being kept from the truth and will
likely be foreclosed from bringing individual claims against the
corporation that defrauded them.
The Jewish Claims Conference, an organization established in the 1950s
to recover and distribute Jewish property, has assets under its care
estimated at $1.3 billion to $3 billion, which includes a vast inventory
of cash, real estate and artwork. Despite the urgency of human
suffering, the conference insists that it cannot respond to the unmet
needs of Holocaust survivors.
Meanwhile, it spent about $32 million last year on programs dedicated to
“research, documentation and education.” Some of those millions went to
a program that paid $700,000 to a “consultant” — a friend of the
organization’s president — who, in an interview with The Jewish Week,
couldn’t recall what he had been asked to consult on. While the
conference supports many worthy projects, it is controlled not by
survivors but by surrogates, and operates with limited oversight and
financial accountability.
The Holocaust, so large an atrocity, has a way of overshadowing
everything, including its survivors. In focusing on the past in order to
prevent history from repeating itself, we have forgotten those who are
the direct casualties of this crime. Amid all the Holocaust hoopla the
survivors have become secondary.
This neglect is widespread. Even the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum has regarded itself as primarily a home for historians and a
monument to history, but not as an institution that places survivors
first. Yet without their anguished presence the museum would not exist.
One demonstration of its inattentiveness involves the imminent transfer
to the museum of electronic copies of Germany’s Bad Arolsen archives,
which hold 50 million documents pertaining to the fate of more than 17.5
million victims. Unfortunately, the museum has failed to commit to
making the archives accessible on the Internet so that they can be
accessed as easily by Holocaust survivors as by visiting scholars.
So what can be done to honor those who survived but who seem to have
been forgotten?
First, all traceable assets held by the cla ims conference and the
negotiated settlements with Swiss bankers and European insurance
companies must be returned to their owners, with the remainder used for
survivor needs.
Second, Congress should pass the proposed Holocaust Insurance
Accountability bill, which would require insurers to publish the names
of policyholders and allow survivors to resolve claims on fair and
truthful terms.
Third, all Holocaust documentation, like the Bad Arolsen archives and
the recently disclosed Austrian war records, must be made readily
accessible. Survivors and their families must have easy access so family
histories can be recovered and property claims verified. These archives
cannot be just the province of scholars.
Finally, if both the World Jewish Congress and the claims conference
fail to achieve transparency in their operations, then Congress or law
enforcement should publicly account for the funds that have been
cont rolled by institutions that survivors never elected and did not
authorize.
Surviving the Holocaust, which was against all odds, is still a numbers
game. The percentages are always against the survivors. Nearly murdered,
shamefully defrauded and with the clock ticking, they wait for justice,
accountability and, most of all, respect.
Thane Rosenbaum, a professor of law at Fordham, is the author of “The
Myth of Moral Justice.”
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To the Editor:
Thane Rosenbaum is a distinguished writer, a sensitive thinker and a friend. I respect him and his work. I have no doubt that Ira Sheskin is a fine demographer. Yet the quote in June 14th’ op-ed is manifestly false or absurdly misleading. Rosenbaum writes:
“After 60 years, Holocaust survivors are inching toward extinction.. According to Ira Sheskin, director of the Jewish Demography Project at the University of Miami, fewer than 900,000 remain, residing primarily in the United States, Israel and the former Soviet Union.”
It is generally accepted that before the war there were 9 million Jews living in Germany, the countries invaded by Germany or allied with Germany where the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” was imposed.
The figures of Jewish dead advanced by well respected Holocaust historians vary from a low of 5.1 million in Raul Hilberg’s work to the commonly used figure of six million. Thus, at the end of World War II there were between 3 million to 3.9 million Jews living somewhere in the world who had lived in Germany, countries occupied by Germany or allied with Nazi Germany.
To presume a survival ratio of 25%-30%, 62 years after the conclusion of the war or 74 years after the rise of Hitler to power in Germany is preposterous. Something is not right with the quote.
It would be unimportant to correct the record, but Holocaust deniers and their allies will exploit this unless it is corrected.
Michael Berenbaum
Los Angeles, California
Dear Editor,
I was pleased to see that the voice of needy Holocaust survivors is being heard by your readers through Thane Rosenbaum’s insightful editorial “Losing Count” (June 14, 2007). Holocaust survivors, some of whom have to decide between buying food and buying medicine on a daily basis, are outraged when they hear about a billion dollars here and a billion dollars there, ostensibly allocated for them.
Mistreatment of the Holocaust survivors is not a new story. At first, the German government, which was forced into giving reparations to those whom they persecuted, set up a system whereby the Germans continued to torture the survivors. Many who applied for reparations were subjected to psychological and physical examinations by the very German doctors who maltreated them during the years of German-occupied Europe. Many survivors’ claims were rejected on one bogus ground after another. And those who were children were outright denied any reparations. The excuse was that since youngsters could not remember the dates they were incarcerated how could they possible have been effected? The Germans were a great examplar for the Swiss banks and the Italian Generali insurance company in “getting away with it.”
Survivors who have sought refuge in America expect more justice from the democracy they adopted and strongly uphold and its governmental institutions.
The Germans are now getting the last laugh because Jewish institutions are repeating the numbers game as so eloquently unfolded by Mr. Rosenbaum.
Sincerely,
Dr. Eva Fogelman
Vice-President
American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants
To the Editor:
As a Holocaust survivor and one who works intimately with the Jewish Claims Conference as its treasurer, I know that the claims conference is not perfect and some mistakes have been made.
On the other hand, there was and is no other organization more actively involved in correcting the injustices committed by the Nazis and their collaborators against the Jews.
The compensation the claims conference negotiated over the years with the German government, German industry and other entities resulted in substantial payments to Jewish Holocaust survivors. The efforts of the claims conference also resulted in large payments for non-Jewish slave and forced laborers.
Such payments can never compensate us for the atrocities we suffered, but they are a potent symbolic acknowledgment of history’s greatest crime.
Today the claims conference helps tens of thousands of survivors in need who continue to be ignored by the community at large.
I am proud of the claims conference’s record, as flawed as it may be.
Roman Kent
New York, June 14, 2007
The writer is chairman of American Gathering/Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
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While technically true, the essay “Losing Count,” by Thane Rosenbaum (Views, June 18) contains serious distortions. The effect of the essay will traumatize Holocaust survivors who will believe they are being victimized again – not by the Nazis but by American courts and Jewish organizations.
To cite just two misrepresentations: The Swiss banks case was a restitution case, not a discretionary fund for all Nazi victims. Of the 1998 settlement of $1.25 billion, some $800 million was set aside for those individuals and heirs who had Nazi-era bank accounts in Switzerland; there also were funds for Jews and non-Jews who performed slave labor.
Yes, “a federal judge in Brooklyn distributed 75 percent of the looted assets to survivors in the former Soviet Union, leaving only 4 percent for destitute survivors in the United States, even though roughly 20 percent of the world’s Holocaust survivors live in America.” However, the looted assets piece was 10 percent of the settlement, and it was distributed on the basis of survivors’ poverty, not their residence.
Rosenbaum also distorts the work and assets of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which successfully secured more than 100 billion Deutsche marks for individual Holocaust survivors since it was established in the 1950s. Yes, it has additional funds at its disposal, which are allocated each year for needy Nazi victims. The distribution is fully documented on its Web site (www.claimscon.org).
Rosenbaum is correct that there are unmet needs. But these are not the exclusive responsibility of the Claims Conference, but of Jewish organizations and social service agencies worldwide.
Marilyn Henry, Teaneck, New Jersey, Author of “Confronting the Perpetrators: A History of the Claims Conference”
I have no doubt that we will never know how many Holocaust survivors remain. My estimate is based upon my own estimate in the US (which is based, in part, on the National Jewish Population Survey) and on the work of Sergio DellaPergola, the well-respected Israeli demographer. Understand that our estimates include flight cases in addition to “survivors.” We have also seen some recent studies suggesting that more than 6 million were killed and we should add to this the fact that the estimates of the Jewish population in European countries in the 1920s and 1930s were probably not very good. Also, Sergio includes Jews in North Africa who came under Nazi rule.
Ira Sheskin, University of Miami