Restitution, But At What Price?

By Jodie Morse

Bernard Lieberman was reared a child of privilege in a small town outside Lodz, Poland. He was one of nine children in an Orthodox Jewish family that lived largely off the money of affluent relatives and regularly opened up its home to poor neighbors. But that comfortable life swiftly ended on Sept. 1, 1939, when the Nazis stormed into Poland. Only 19, Bernard was soon separated from his siblings and transported from camp to camp, doing time in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Bernard (who later changed his last name from Lieberman to Lee) made it out of the war alive, but he lost his entire family. Now, like many survivors, he is fighting to get something back. In October he joined a class action filed in the Federal District Court of New York against Dresdner Bank, where a wealthy family member had an account. "There were 6 million people who were murdered, and every family had something," says Lee. "Our things do not belong to them, and justice will be done when they are given back."

Demands for justice from Holocaust survivors like Lee are steadily mounting. In August, Switzerland's two largest banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion to settle wartime claims against them. Since then no fewer than 10 class actions have been filed against European companies that do business in the U.S. Some of these are claims for individual accounts confiscated by banks in Germany and Austria. Others charge that major corporations such as Krupp, Volkswagen and Daimler-Benz profited from slave labor during the wartime years and should pay billions in back wages and other compensation. The issue of Holocaust reparations was raised again at a conference in Washington last week sponsored by the State Department and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where representatives from 44 countries discussed the restitution of artworks and other Holocaust-era assets.

Amid all this, however, a small but growing segment of the survivor community is questioning whether the campaign for restitution has gone too far and is sending the wrong message. "This is not how the survivors want the Holocaust to be remembered," says Roman Kent, chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. "The image and memory of those killed have been put in the background, and all I hear about now is the glitter of gold." Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, voices a similar concern: "Survivors who have claims deserve to bring them forward, but it's at a heavy price. The next generation will believe it's all about money."

Or all about lawyers. With so many suits, competing attorneys have taken to squabbling publicly over how to proceed and how to divvy up the spoils. In recent months attorneys have crisscrossed the U.S. and Europe to pack their rosters with survivors; in some cases they have rushed to file competing claims against the same company in different states.

The lawyers involved in these cases argue that the civil justice system is the only mode of recourse. "You can't send a company to jail for these things," says Washington attorney Michael Hausfeld, who helped slap Ford with a slave-labor suit last March. Both Ford and General Motors have been fighting charges, reported last week in the Washington Post, that their German subsidiaries aided the Nazi war effort. Ford has admitted that its German plants were seized by the Nazis, but the company maintains that it severed all ties to these outposts during the war. GM issued a statement "categorically denying" that it aided the Nazis in World War II.

Others contend that even if the charges are true, the pursuit of monetary restitution is misdirected. "When you're taking money from Volkswagen today, it's coming not from the Nazis but from a 30-year-old German," says Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz. Then there's the question of who is entitled to the money from any settlements. Survivors have yet to see a dime from the Swiss settlement, because lawyers and Jewish organizations are still hammering out the details. Under one proposal being floated by the World Jewish Restitution Organization, after specific claims are settled, 80% of what's left would go to destitute survivors and 20% to Holocaust education. Gizella Wiesshaus, the 69-year-old survivor who brought the first claim against the Swiss banks, protested this kind of arrangement outside the State Department conference last week, claiming that the money should go only to those who suffered.

Many claimants, like Bernard Lee, have pledged to give anything they receive to charity. Yet time is not on their side. Lee, who is 77 and was recently hospitalized for heart trouble, is worried that "every day some new survivor passes away." The lawyers, undoubtedly, will carry on.

--With reporting by Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit

With reporting by Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit