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Friday August 13, 2004

Matching dollars with souls

Politics aside, Holocaust Claims Conference goes about its work

by gary rosenblatt

The fourth-floor midtown office of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany Inc., known widely and less formally as the Claims Conference, appears totally lacking in human drama. It houses 180 staffers, many of them working in small cubicles with computers, phones and files.

The atmosphere seems no different from that of an accounting firm. But the quiet office, with its emphasis on efficiency, courtesy and statistical accuracy, belies the nature of the work at hand — namely, trying to provide every Holocaust survivor in the world with financial remuneration as at least symbolic recognition of the enormous physical, spiritual, psychological and economic losses they suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

It’s a monumental task. But while debates continue to swirl about the politics of Holocaust restitution — the legal tangles over who are the neediest survivors, and whether European governments and institutions are cooperating sufficiently — the Claims Conference tries to go about its work without getting caught up in the disputes. Its charge: researching and processing the applications of tens of thousands of survivors and heirs of victims.

Some say the conference leadership is not operating with sufficient transparency, that its decision-making apparatus has changed little since it began more than five decades ago and that it was less than efficient in the past. Others credit the organization with vital diplomatic and political success in negotiating for the return of property stolen or destroyed by the Nazis, and securing and disbursing billions of dollars to individuals and organizations over the years.

Controversy aside, the Claims Conference sent out the largest-ever single Holocaust-related payment last week. It mailed out $3,000 each to more than 130,000 survivors deemed to have been slave laborers, a modest sum for each individual but adding up to more than $400 million. The numbers tend to obscure the grinding details that go into identifying, communicating with and authenticating so many people in 62 countries around the world.

(Israel has the most recipients, with almost 62,000; then comes the United States with 33,500, almost half of whom, 15,000, are in New York, mostly in Brooklyn.)

With the help of an office computer, Gideon Taylor, executive vice president of the Claims Conference, explained the complex process of compensation during my visit the other day, showing how the special software system records every person who has made a claim and tracks every written or phone contact with the claimant, and the outcome.

At times staffers have worked around the clock in day and night shifts, fielding up to 2,000 phone calls a day in many languages from people with queries about whether they are eligible for help and how to go about applying for funds. Within six months, for example, the conference received 265,000 applications from 80 countries from individuals who said they performed slave labor during World War II. That was three years ago, and the result is this second payment; the first came two years ago. The total of the two payments from the Germans and the Swiss is $1.32 billion.

“This is not just about the restitution of money,” Taylor said, “but the restitution of history as well.” He said his office’s research resulted in the most detailed information to date on many Holocaust facts, including the number of places of slave labor persecution (8,200) and documentation on each of the 130,000 slave laborers culled from 150 archives in 30 countries. (Among the difficulties was reconciling the many different spellings of places and names, with the word Auschwitz alone spelled 700 different ways.) According to Taylor, this research helped the Claims Conference find the names of 30,000 people who would not have been identified otherwise as qualified to receive compensation.

A report on Nazi medical experiments found that there were 195 types of procedures performed on 2,500 people still alive, living in 32 countries. The report, with its ghastly details on the experimentation, is not for the squeamish. It underscores the challenge for Claims Conference staffers to strive to be professional in all phases of their work without losing touch with the human pain they are chronicling.

Perhaps no one there is more sensitive to this issue than Aron Krell, 77, a survivor of the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz and several other concentration camps. A teenager at the time, he lost his entire family in the Holocaust. Several years ago, after retiring as a waiter in New York, Krell read a newspaper article on the work of the Claims Conference and called up to volunteer his services because, he explained, “I want to do what I can to help people.” He spends two or three days a week and about three or four hours a day in the office, mostly processing files, though he is sometimes called on to speak in Yiddish or Polish to survivors calling with questions.

As the only survivor in the office, Krell said he appreciates the staff’s efforts at professionalism as well as the sense of urgency and frustration among some of the claimants.

“I try to explain to them that we know they need the money and that they will get it as soon as possible,” Krell said, noting that the payments are based on the cooperation of the Germans and Swiss.

Marina Andrews, who has a master’s degree in international relations focusing on Eastern Europe, has worked at the Claims Conference for two years. Her knowledge of French, Russian, Ukrainian, and 10 other Slavic and Romance languages has proven invaluable in dealing regularly with claimants by phone and e-mail.

“Meeting real people, not just reading about them in books, has made this experience very personal,” she said the other day. “We learn from every survivor.”

With the completion of the slave labor payments, the Claims Conference will be moving on to the Swiss bank account claimants as another area of compensation, along with its ongoing programs. Taylor said some elements of the organization’s work is “winding down” as survivors die out, but he asserted that the advocacy efforts of the conference — pushing for more and larger pensions for health- and home-care — will go on as long as survivors are alive.

He knows that headlines will continue to be made about the ugly fight between Jews over money while the Swiss bankers, slow to pay up, must be laughing. But in the meantime, history, technology and humanity will meet up each day in the quiet offices of the Claims Conference, where the goal remains to go on matching dollars with souls.

Gary Rosenblatt is the editor and publisher of The New York Jewish Week.

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