Proof of Suffering Is Price of Holocaust Reparations

One can still hear the smack of the scythe smashing her head. Denting her skull. How much is that brutal sound worth? One can still taste the grass that she chewed to quiet her ever-clawing hunger. How much is that bitter taste worth? One can still feel the panic that swamped him as he stood in a death line, waiting for the killers to get to his row. How much is that memory worth?

How much?

How to quantify the indescribable? How to calculate the unimaginable?

How to compensate victims for the horrors of the Holocaust?

Fifty-one years after Nazi Germany crumbled, those questions haunt a dwindling group of Holocaust survivors.

Most of their fellow survivors have long since received some compensation--not enough to erase their torment, of course, but enough to cushion them through old age. The German government has paid more than $60 billion to victims of the Nazis since World War II, and is paying more than 130,000 survivors lifetime pensions--a commitment that will cost another $20 billion over the next few decades.

This group has not shared in that bounty. They are refugees from the former Soviet Union.

Soviet Jews, isolated and terrified by Communist dictators, never had a chance to apply for German money under the reparation program launched after the war. When they began emigrating from the Soviet Union in the 1980s--carrying to freedom their own tales of Nazi atrocities--the German government established a fresh compensation fund for them, setting aside more than $1 billion for monthly pensions and one-time payments.

But to lay claim to that fund--”blood money,” they call it--survivors must submit their suffering to arbitrators. They must lay out their pain to be counted, must squeeze their most biting memories into impersonal equations.

Too often, they find, their persecution does not measure up. Their ordeals do not fit the models. Their torture was not long enough, their tears not well enough documented. So their pensions are not granted. More than 90,000 Soviet emigrants worldwide have applied for this last chance to receive German pensions. Only about a third of them eventually will qualify.

“It’s unbelievable what they do to us,” said Klara Volk, a 60-year-old survivor who has fought for compensation for the past 18 months from her home in Northern California. “My heart will never, ever heal.”

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a nonprofit group representing two dozen international Jewish organizations, will send a delegation to Bonn this month to press for relaxation of the eligibility requirements. The German consul general in Los Angeles, Hans Alard von Rohr, said he was not privy to the reasons for the rules, but added that despite “economic difficulties” and “budget cuts in every field,” his country remained committed to helping survivors “who have legitimate claims.” The sticking point, as always, is deciding which claims qualify as legitimate. Dissatisfied with the quiet negotiations in Bonn, the Southern California Council for Soviet Jews is pushing for bolder action, fiercer pressure, louder outrage on behalf of at least 100 Holocaust victims in the Los Angeles area who suffered greatly, but whose stories do not meet the bureaucratic definition of legitimate.

These activists are making a moral point, of course. But they also need pensions for sadly pragmatic reasons: They are old. They are sick. They are poor. They are the last witnesses to the Holocaust. And they are determined to exact reparations before they die.

“At this point in history, to think that a group of survivors would go wanting because they somehow do not fit in with the way the [eligibility] regulations were written would not just be unfair,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, “it would be unjust.”

Stringent Requirements

Soviet survivors find the pension eligibility requirements, which the Claims Conference negotiated with the German government three years ago, not only too restrictive, but also painfully demeaning.

Pensions are available only for those who endured at least six months in a concentration camp, or spent 18 months confined in a ghetto or hiding “under inhumane conditions.” Survivors who meet those criteria must prove their suffering with official documents--an enormous burden for Jews from the former Soviet Union, where archive maintenance was spotty at best.

Then, too, applicants must prove they truly need the money. An individual taking in more than $15,000 a year after taxes cannot receive a German pension, no matter what cruelties he or she endured. Survivors bristle at that rule especially. The German blood money, they say, is supposed to be compensation, not charity. Restitution, not welfare.

“What business is it of theirs how much money we make?” said Auschwitz survivor Si Frumkin of Studio City, who is organizing protests on behalf of Soviet Jews in Southern California.

Railing against the eligibility restrictions as “obscene” and “immoral,” Auschwitz survivor Fred Diament said they belittle the immense horror that Holocaust victims experienced every hour. The rules imply, he says furiously, that someone who survived five months in a concentration camp did not suffer enough to merit compensation.

“They should create a model of Auschwitz and those [who made the rules] should be forced to spend just two days there,” said Diament, vice president of the Southern California Council of Holocaust Survivors, “to live with the constant smell of burning flesh, to ask where your mother is and have the guards point to the smokestacks.”

Claims Conference Executive Vice President Saul Kagan says he understands the survivors’ frustration. He too wishes he could relax the rules and serve more people from the $635-million pension fund Germany has set aside for Holocaust survivors from the Soviet Union.

But the Claims Conference, which is charged with evaluating applications and distributing the German money, cannot simply abandon the rules negotiated over 16 painful months, Kagan said.

Fiercely defending his negotiating team, Kagan said it got the best deal it could from a German government struggling to take care of its own citizens in an era of high unemployment and crimped budgets. The six Claims Conference negotiators--including four Holocaust survivors--have even won some concessions in follow-up talks, such as securing one-time hardship payments to Jews who adopted false identities as children to escape the Nazi slaughter.

It’s not enough, Kagan acknowledges. But he maintains it’s better than nothing.

“It would have been very easy to say we would not take an agreement with such restrictive terms,” Kagan said. “We would have gotten wonderful editorials. But the net result would have been that 32,000 needy Holocaust survivors [expected to qualify for pensions] would be shut out of financial support they need.”

That argument does not sit well with 57-year-old Anna Fishman of West Hollywood. She lives on disability payments of $626 a month. And though she received a one-time payment of about $2,700 from Germany four years ago, she scarcely considers that adequate restitution for the hunger, the pain, and the chilling fear that saturated ghetto life in German-occupied Ukraine.

Difficult to Prove

Her six siblings, her parents, her aunts and her uncles all died in the Holocaust. For them, she cannot receive a cent. For herself, she thinks she deserves a pension, $325 each month to help pay the rent or the medical bills, or even just to buy ingredients for the cheese-filled pastries she so loves to bake.

The problem is the proof.

The groove on her skull, a legacy of the scythe that bashed her in the ghetto when she was just a toddler, is not considered proof. Nor are the blotchy brown spots on her chin where Nazi henchmen burned her.

Fishman can produce testimony from three eyewitnesses who lived with her in the desperately poor and overcrowded ghetto--where, she said, lice crawled over her body and the only medicine to treat her wounded head was moonshine vodka. Fishman can prove, through Red Cross lists, that she was not evacuated before the Germans swept through her small village. But she has not been able to find an official document listing her as a resident of the ghetto. So she has not been eligible to receive a pension.

“How can we prove it? How can we prove it?” she asked in bewilderment, the Russian words tumbling out as she caressed cracked photos of her long-dead sister. “They burned me with a red-hot iron, and no one believes me.”

Her friend and fellow survivor Simon Shpitalnik added bitterly: “When the Germans killed you, they didn’t give you a document.”

Shpitalnik, who lives in Marina del Rey, spent two years trying to prove his chilling wartime saga to the Claims Conference, while subsisting on U.S. government checks of $212 a month plus food stamps. He just received word that his pension has been granted, his stories backed up by Ukrainian archives. But Shpitalnik regards his success as a lucky accident. Of the 220 Soviet Jewish survivors in Southern California, he said, only about 20% have the necessary documents.

The anguish of trying to prove their suffering rubs especially raw for Jews from the former Soviet Union, because their wartime torments received little attention compared with the well-documented genocide at Polish camps such as Auschwitz.

Even today, the camps and ghettos that Soviet Jews most feared--Piechory, Domanevka, Vinnitsa and others--rarely show up in scholarly accounts of the Holocaust. So when fellow Jews question their stories, Soviet survivors fear their ordeals are fast fading from world consciousness.

“They say, ‘Never forget,’ but where is the justice for us?” Fishman asked.

Survivors know they have precious few years left to press the Soviet Jewish experience into wartime histories.

The details that have made it into world scholarship are sparse but sickening.

When Hitler’s einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, accompanied at times by Romanian fascists, tens of thousands of Jews were shot on the spot. Countless others were crammed into squalid ghettos or makeshift death camps.

In the Ukrainian town of Domanevka, for example, Romanian gendarmes killed 18,000 Jews by shooting them in groups of 500. The rest were herded into filthy barracks to starve. The few ravaged survivors were put to work burning the dog-gnawed bodies of the dead--a task that took two months to complete.

By war’s end, at least 1.2 million Jews had perished in German-occupied Soviet territory.

Those who survived faced more misery under the regime of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. In a twisted bit of logic, Stalin reasoned that anyone who survived German occupation must have collaborated with the Nazis, so he killed or exiled many of the Russian soldiers who returned home from German prisoner-of-war camps. In that murderous atmosphere, persecuted Jews did not dare speak of their ordeals, much less demand compensation.

Now, half a century later, survivors who emigrate from the Soviet Union are eligible for two programs under the German policy of wiedergutmachung, or making good.

The Hardship Fund provides one-time grants of about $3,250 to needy survivors who have received no prior compensation and can demonstrate either old age or very poor health. The second fund, known as Article 2, offers lifetime monthly pensions of about $325 to survivors who meet the stringent criteria.

Documents Scarce

Perhaps the toughest requirement demands that survivors prove their persecution with official documents--not eyewitness testimony--before receiving pensions.

When the Nazis stormed through a huge swath of Soviet territory (including most of today’s western Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia), they left behind detailed but disorganized records, said Radu Ioanid, director of the registry of survivors at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

The conquering soldiers might, for example, have jotted down that they confiscated two silver teaspoons from Jew X. Or that Jew Y came down with typhus and had to be shot before the disease could spread. They also drew up lists of able-bodied laborers and ghetto residents. But some victims, especially children, spent years incarcerated without ever making it to a list.

Those gaps in the archives, compounded by poor storage conditions, confound some survivors trying to prove their eligibility for pensions.

To help, the Claims Conference’s worldwide staff scours archives for acceptable documentation, which can include not only German lists, but also Soviet records such as school registrations or residency permits proving the applicant lived through the war in occupied territory.

“We make all kinds of efforts to speed it up,” Kagan said. “Nonetheless, it is a tedious and laborious process.”

Klara Volk knows that from bitter experience. Until she finally found her mother’s name--not her own--on a ghetto document stashed in the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Claims Conference had rejected every proof she tried to submit.

The signed testimony from a Ukrainian doctor who saved her from the fascists by hiding her in his stove did not do the trick. Neither did a notarized document, stamped by a village elder, confirming that Volk’s family lasted 2 1/2 years in a local ghetto. Or an autobiography she wrote years ago in Russia, long before she could have known that claiming residency in a ghetto might earn her a monthly pension.

Forced to stick with the eligibility rules, Volk’s caseworker, a fellow Russian immigrant, demanded birth certificates or other official documents. She could not even accept Volk’s poignant testimony--of watching soldiers flay her mother into a welter of “blood and meat,” of nibbling on grass to soothe her pinched stomach, of coming across a childhood friend strung between two trees and beaten to death for an unknown transgression.

In broken English, the caseworker’s questionnaire expressed doubt that Volk would have been able to survive at all in occupied territory: “As for me, it is very strange that the Nazis did not kill Jews. . . . We need the explanation.”

The very question incenses activist Frumkin. “The Holocaust revisionists say we don’t know the gas chamber exists because we haven’t talked to anyone who came out of there alive,” Frumkin said. “Now [Claims Conference administrators] are saying they don’t know for sure that people suffered in the ghetto because they came out of there alive. . . . Whose side are they on?”

A Lithuanian native, Frumkin managed to flee to the United States shortly after the war, and received “compensation” of $1,800 for the tattoo the Nazis burned into his arm and the torments they seared into his soul. He mailed the check off to Israel, refusing to use it himself. But he still fights fiercely for other survivors who need German money to get by.

More Painful Stories

There are always new cases to take up. Lawyer Natasha Mogley, who has won a pension for only one of the 26 applicants whose cases she handled, tells of one woman turned down because her husband makes $30,000 a year--above the income cutoff of $19,000 per couple.

Another elderly survivor, a cancer patient, was rejected because he does not have a green card proving legal residency in the United States. His request for political asylum has been accepted, but the Claims Conference--bound by negotiated rules--cannot begin processing his application until he receives the official green card.

“He told them, ‘By the time you finally agree to pay me, there will be no more me left to receive the money,’ ” Mogley recounted. “They act like they’re God, holding their money up high. You feel like a beggar.”

Fearing just such degradation, many Jews rejected the concept of taking money from Germany immediately after World War II. When the Claims Conference was established in 1952 to negotiate compensations, Jews stormed Israel’s parliament building in protest. Critics predicted that “somehow, somewhere along the line the victims would have to come to the German government hat in hand,” Rabbi Cooper said.

In fact, even in the very first negotiations, the Jewish delegation reported an atmosphere akin to a “cattle market,” where they had to fight hard for every deutsche mark.

These days, negotiations have only gotten harder, Jewish leaders say. Memories of the war have faded. And Germany struggles with a shaky economy, a disgruntled work force and unpopular cuts in social programs.

Kagan predicts that the two compensation programs for Soviet refugees will run out of money by the end of 1997. He hopes to negotiate to keep the funds viable at least through 1999. And he plans, too, to push for more liberal eligibility requirements, to get as many pensions as he can, as soon as he can.

“The Claims Conference,” he vowed, his weary voice gaining strength, “is not giving up.”