Bitter Secrets and a Cache of Gold

Elizabeth Trilling-Grotch walked unnoticed among the rich of Madison Avenue, a phantom in an old black coat drifting among the fashionable. Their world of wealth had once been hers, a life so distant she can only conjure it up in other people’s memories. She is laying claim to her lost world, even if nations are shamed and old men anguish.

She had come to Manhattan from her Bay Area home to call her late husband’s relatives. But she had other business: a meeting with officials of the World Jewish Congress, whose researchers had found letters written by her relatives to the U.S. State Department at the end of World War II. Begging for help in tracking down a missing family account in a Swiss bank, the pleas were met with form letters. Decades of silence followed.

Trilling-Grotch is a child of the Holocaust, born to a privileged life she never possessed. At 58, she mourns a family exterminated and a fortune vanished. A half-century on, she seeks the only measure of justice left to her, tracking the missing funds her mother mentioned the last night they spent together in a Warsaw Ghetto attic. “Don’t worry,” were her mother’s whispered words. “There is money in a Swiss account.”

Long rumored, rarely found, such accounts are part of an enduring mystery of the Holocaust: What happened to the lost assets of the millions who died? As Jewish groups have pressed in recent months for a full accounting, the rush to research government annals has only added to the enigma.

Documents emerging from the search for Swiss accounts led to the discovery last summer of another piece of the 50-year-old puzzle deep in the underground vault of the Federal Reserve of New York. It is a two-ton cache of war gold, controlled by an obscure Allied commission that exists to replenish the once-looted state treasuries of Europe. The horde’s origins are uncertain. But it is suspected that some ingots contain gold pried from the teeth and wedding-ring fingers of those herded into the death camps.

Run by a troika of American, British and French diplomats in Brussels, the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold has spent a half-century sorting out competing claims of European governments for bullion seized by the Allies at the end of the war. Most of the gold is gone, and the last of the hoard is scheduled to be allotted by early next year.

The New York gold trove and the missing accounts of Holocaust survivors are not directly related, separate holes in history. But they form twin sides of an international morality tale whose answers were likely buried by political decisions made a half-century ago--decisions that once seemed so right but now are tinged with gray.

The deeper researchers dig into the loam of postwar history, the more bitter the roots they expose. There are difficult questions for the Swiss, who stand accused of hiding behind the veil of confidentiality as the holdings of death camp victims were siphoned away. And there are troubling questions about how hard U.S. officials tried to identify and preserve assets stolen from Holocaust victims.

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Inside the National Archives in Washington, where researchers compete for new nuggets of revelation, the old documents still have the power to astonish--if not for their answers, then for the moral questions they pose.

“No one pushed as hard as they could have,” said Richard Breitman, a professor of Holocaust history at Washington’s American University whose students are poring over the papers. “What’s valuable is that we’re finally beginning to pay real attention to how Jewish assets were disposed of after the war.”

It is the files that awoke Trilling-Grotch’s determination to seek what she believes is hers. Her relatives’ old letters, found stuffed in a dust-caked National Archives binder, enabled researchers to track her to her Northern California home in June. The letters helped her realize, she says now, “that I wasn’t alone.” Recently, pressing her own case, she joined a class-action lawsuit against Swiss banks, which was filed in New York.

She has no more hope now than she ever did of learning the truth. But “at least,” she said, “I’m being true to my family.”

After a half-century of wondering, it is a start.

Escape From Warsaw Ghetto

She was not allowed to cough. Even when she caught cold inside the drafty attic where she hid, the young girl had to stifle the reflex. Self-denial was the difference between freedom and death in the warrens of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. It was the only life 4-year-old Elizabeth Trilling knew.

She emerged into the apartment only when her mother whispered the all-clear. On the streets below, Nazi police listened for the cries of children. Youngsters were to be deported to the camps. Fearing Elizabeth’s capture, Rose Trilling asked her nanny to spirit her away.

Jania Zlow, a Polish Christian peasant, was the last loyal hire of Roman and Rose Trilling, an elite Jewish couple whose textile mill in the town of Bialystock had employed hundreds. Before the war, Zlow later told Elizabeth, the Trillings lived “like kings of schmaltz,” filling their home with fine art.

That life ended months after Elizabeth’s birth. Russian troops raced into Bialystock to fend off the Nazi blitzkrieg of 1939. Denounced as a capitalist, Roman perished in the Soviet gulag. As the Nazis consolidated their hold, the Jews of Poland were herded to Warsaw, candidates for the death camps.

At dusk on a summer night in 1943, Rose Trilling summoned Elizabeth and her nanny. She begged Zlow to escape with Elizabeth. Perhaps they could join relatives in America. Rose Trilling rummaged in the attic, returning with pearls and a diamond ring.

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There was more, Elizabeth heard her mother say, if the child made it to safety: “You will be independent after the war.” Roman Trilling, she said, had opened a bank account in Switzerland before Poland fell.

Zlow promised to stay with Elizabeth until they reached America.

The mother sobbed, wrapping the child in a red wool scarf. “You must live for me,” she said. The nanny hurried Elizabeth down the stairs. That night, she smuggled the child out of the ghetto, bundling her in a laundry parcel.

Rose Trilling died in the concentration camp at Treblinka.

Despite her dark, delicate features, Elizabeth passed as Zlow’s daughter until the war’s end. Prevented by immigration quotas from entering the United States, nanny and child stayed together in Sweden, then Cuba, before arriving in the U.S. in 1949.

In Los Angeles, Elizabeth was steeped in memories of a life she never knew. Her relatives, wealthy French refugees, gave Elizabeth sepia photographs of her parents. They told nostalgic tales of carriage rides and lavish parties.

“It was someone else’s life, not mine,” Trilling-Grotch recalled. Caught up in their reveries, she fantasized about tables heaped with pastries. “I just remember wishing I was older, that I could have been there to enjoy it.”

Her relatives vowed to track down the rumored Swiss account. Max Trilling, Elizabeth’s stockbroker uncle, had been reared in Switzerland with his brother, Roman. Surely, the civilized Swiss would do everything possible to recover the missing funds.

From 1946 to 1950, the Trillings wrote to Swiss authorities. A full search, they were told by the Swiss Compensation Office, could not be performed without account numbers or documents proving Elizabeth’s parents were dead. “Concentration camps would give you a death certificate?” Trilling-Grotch said bitterly.

Her uncle turned to his new government. “I wish to inquire what help the Department of State can give me,” he wrote in 1950.

There was no help. In once-classified communiques, Swiss officials told American diplomats there was no family account. But a State Department officer advised him to write yet again to the Compensation Office. The circle of frustration was complete. He gave up.

A half-century later, lawyers for Trilling-Grotch in the lawsuit accuse the Swiss of trying to “publicly understate or deny the existence of dormant accounts and accounts containing looted and cloaked assets.”

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“In ordinary times, if a claimant showed up with the proper criteria, the accounts would be given up,” said Richard S. Lewis, one of her lawyers. “But these were extraordinary times, and for years the Swiss banks made no extra effort to find these accounts.”

Swiss officials acknowledge only that a “lack of sensitivity on the level of bank clerks” turned away survivors, said David Vogelsanger, an embassy spokesman in Washington. In recent years, he said, the Swiss have done their best to close the “difficult cases.”

By 1972, a 10-year search of bank records by the Swiss netted $2.5 million for survivors and relatives. But Jewish groups claimed that more missing accounts remained.

Swiss banks hired an ombudsman this year to again look into individual requests about missing accounts. And they have lifted banking-secrecy constraints to let a task force, headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker, investigate how the accounts were handled.

Jewish leaders perceive the Swiss moves as “half-steps,” said Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress. Despite hopes that a new generation of Swiss bankers may be more open, Steinberg expects “more delays and stonewalling.”

The newly found State Department files have led some historians to suggest that American diplomats failed to apply steady pressure on the Swiss. “Our government responds to the issues of the moment,” said Leonard Dinnerstein, director of Judaic studies at the University of Arizona. “In the Cold War, everything else receded.”

State Department historian William Z. Slaney points to the role U.S. diplomats played in a 1962 agreement that led to the recovery of the $2.5 million in missing accounts. But the persistent questions have prompted the Clinton administration to appoint Commerce Undersecretary Stuart Eizenstat to investigate the U.S. role in tracking Holocaust assets.

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Benjamin B. Ferencz, 76, a New York attorney and ex-Nuremberg prosecutor who represented private aid groups in post-war talks with the Swiss over missing accounts, says U.S. diplomats clung to a “neutral” stance, preoccupied with winning Swiss support in the effort to rebuild Europe and isolate the Soviets.

But Ferencz doubts that State Department officers were unduly “reluctant to push the case. . . . What could we do, declare war?”

There were no embarrassing documents in those days, little public pressure, no lawsuits or commissions. After Zlow and Elizabeth’s relatives died, she moved to New York, married a scientist and settled into middle-class life in El Cerrito, Calif., rearing two daughters.

She still dreamed of her parents, but there was no more talk of recovering what was left. “I felt like everyone had failed us. How long do you keep pushing?” Life had to be lived, not dreamed.

She put away her mother’s scarf in a box filled with mothballs.

Sifting Through National Archives

Every morning, researchers troop into the sun-puddled reading rooms of Washington’s National Archives. They trudge out hours later, briefcases clogged with gray photocopies of old letters, position papers, internal memorandums from so long ago.

researchers wage a quiet war for information, a competition that shapes legal maneuvers and publicity battles in New York and Washington, Brussels and Bern, Germany.

d Jewish Congress volunteers and aides to Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) spread out over several carrels. Swiss bank researchers often sit at another table. Nearby, State Department historians, lawyers and Breitman’s students plumb the files.

“Almost everything we’ve learned comes from the documents,” said Gregg J. Rickman, a D’Amato aide.

The researchers have been at it since April, when WJC President Edgar Bronfman asked D’Amato to apply pressure on Switzerland to open its banking files. Bronfman, the Canadian liquor magnate, was trying to jump-start talks that collapsed in 1995 after Swiss bankers told Jewish leaders that a new search of bank records netted only 774 missing accounts. The bankers offered $32 million to settle all old claims, but Bronfman spurned the offer, convinced that there were more accounts.

D’Amato asked the CIA, the State Department and the Treasury Department for all files pertinent to Jewish holdings in Switzerland. The agencies said the files were in the National Archives.

The first researcher there was Miriam Kleiman, 29, an unemployed Jewish agency worker. A friend at the WJC offered a temporary job expected to last “two days to one week.” It lasted six months.

“I thought I knew a lot about the Holocaust,” said Kleiman, who does research for the Washington law firm that represents Trilling-Grotch. “But when you read these desperate letters . . . you realize how much of the story is still unfinished.”

Since then, Kleiman and other researchers have amassed tens of thousands of files. Some sit, still unopened, in boxes in Steinberg’s New York office. “God knows what we haven’t seen,” he said.

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Among the findings: Nazi accounts opened in Switzerland to hide assets stolen from Jews. Agreements that allowed the Swiss to take contents of heirless Holocaust accounts to compensate for property lost in Communist countries. And the first documented hints of the New York gold.

Most of this was known to historians familiar with postwar diplomacy. “These papers were sitting there, declassified, as long as 20 years ago,” said Alfred L. Smith Jr., author of “Hitler’s Gold,” an account of postwar economic diplomacy.

the files, depicted as bombshells each time they are made public by D’Amato and WJC officials, have had a devastating impact. Swiss bankers have hired a public relations team to counter each broadside. And the files are energizing Holocaust survivors and relatives. More than 1,000 have written the Swiss, claiming missing accounts.

“Even if all we’re left with is questions,” said Kleiman, “at least they’re finally being asked.”

Obscure Mission to Return Gold

The account is about to be closed.

For 50 years, the Tripartite Commission has stored gold in the Federal Reserve vault. The panel is an obscurity among the 60 countries, corporations and wealthy families that keep 9,000 tons of gold in the bank’s granite-walled chamber--the world’s largest repository of gold. Tripartite Commission records are still secret after 50 years. Few Americans know of its existence, fewer track its progress. The commission, created by the Allies in 1946, exists to deplete its gold reserve, then dissolve itself--a finish that could come by January.

“The commissioners don’t have much autonomy,” said Armistead Lee, a retired American economic officer who served in the panel’s Brussels headquarters in the early 1960s. “You listen to legal arguments from different countries, wait for the decision from Washington. Then you sign documents to move the gold around. Not exactly an exciting task.”

But Jewish leaders were stunned when they learned about the commission and its $25 million in gold. How much of the gold, they wondered, came from the bodies of the Holocaust dead? The more they researched, the more they began to doubt the depth of American resolve 50 years ago to repatriate the thefts of genocide.

“You can’t equate what this country did compared to the butchery of the Nazis or the self-interest of the Swiss,” Steinberg said. “But there are gradations of guilt here.”

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The first hint came last summer as Kleiman and WJC researchers scanned U.S. archives on Operation Safehaven, a Treasury Department effort to track looted Nazi gold traded to Switzerland during the war. Researchers found a newly declassified 1942 warning from British officials to the State Department that 21 tons of Nazi gold had been traded through Swiss banks.

Jewish leaders asked the British to examine their own files. It was the British Foreign Office’s September reply that provided the first news that 5.5 tons of gold remained from 300 tons of looted bullion seized by the Allies at the end of the war. Nearly 4 tons were in the Bank of England in London and two tons in the vault under southern Manhattan.

From there, Steinberg said, “we worked our way backward.” The trail led first to the seizure of the war’s greatest treasure. In April 1945, American soldiers stumbled upon 100 tons of bullion--worth more than $2.7 billion--hidden by the retreating Nazi army in a potassium mine in Merkers, northeast of Frankfurt, Germany. Soldiers from the U.S. 90th Infantry Division who descended by creaky elevator into the mine were agog at what they saw in the glare of their flashlights.

They found thousands of gunny sacks filled with gold ingots, coins and currency. One room was stacked with art treasures. In another corner, valises lay crammed with flatware and jewelry.

“It was beyond imagination,” recalled John Busterud, then a lieutenant and later an assistant defense secretary in the Nixon administration. “One armful would have made any of us rich men.”

Scattered in the valises, Busterud and his men found darker treasure: Gold fillings pried from the teeth of concentration camp victims. “It didn’t take much to imagine how the Nazis got them,” Busterud said.

Just as the death camps perfected assembly-line murder, they also became factories for the extraction of riches. At Auschwitz, according to German bank documents, 18 pounds of gold fillings were taken each day. At Buchenwald, American liberators found 300 pounds of loose fillings--a pittance compared to the estimated tons of dental and jewelry gold melted into ingots and traded off by Germany’s treasury.

Joel Fisher, a 77-year-old lawyer who in 1945 was a military officer assigned to comb German banks for Nazi assets, said U.S. officials “knew tons of fillings were melted down. The question was what to do with the gold.”

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Confidential documents recently found in the archives reveal that the U.S. Embassy in Paris urged the State Department in 1946 to recommend “assaying” the Merkers bars, which might “represent melted-down gold teeth fillings.”

A reply, if there was one, has not been found.

In assaying, sample bars are tested to determine a gold shipment’s origins. Expert metallurgists interviewed by The Times said melted gold and even purer “refined gold”--ore in which metallic impurities are filtered out--might have been analyzed successfully after the war.

“The purer gold is, the harder it is to figure out where it came from,” said John H. Lutley, president of the Gold Institute and an expert metallurgist. But Lutley and others said the United States could have determined if the gold contained traces of palladium and other metallic sources--indications, Lutley said, “of dental alloys.”

But “such an examination was never undertaken by the Tripartite Commission,” the agency’s secretary general, Emrys T. Davies, wrote to D’Amato last month.

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Instead, Allied diplomats who met in Paris in December 1945 agreed to forward only “nonmonetary gold”--loose fillings, jewelry, coin collections--to refugee organizations to aid Jewish and other homeless victims of the war. The gold bars were earmarked for the looted European treasuries.

“Our negotiators were naive,” said Alfred Lipson, a Holocaust researcher at Queensborough Community College in New York. “They lost their best chance to get back what the Nazis took.”

Lipson has personal animus. A Polish Jew who survived the death camps at Auschwitz and Dachau, his gold wedding band was confiscated by Nazi guards. “My fillings, they would have got if they killed me,” he said glumly.

Seymour J. Rubin, a negotiator in Paris in 1945--and an American Jew--bridles at revisionist criticism of the gold agreements. “I worked my ass off, doing whatever I possibly could,” said Rubin, 82, an international law expert who was the chief U.S. diplomat in the gold-reparation talks.

Rubin insists that the United States cut “the best deal we could get.” France and other nations were pressing for the return of all gold.

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Looking back, he conceded, American diplomats doubted that assaying the gold would be conclusive. “It did not occur to us you could tell whether these bars came from teeth or bracelets,” he said. Nor did they receive any pressure, Rubin said, from Jewish groups.

“Did we do all we could to find Holocaust assets? No, probably not,” said Steinberg, who insists that the WJC “was in the dark. No one asked our opinion.”

State Department officials say most of the New York gold would not have required testing because those ingots were transferred from Swiss bullion already kept in the Federal Reserve. The bars were part of a $60-million penalty Switzerland agreed to pay the Allies for war-trading with the Nazis. Still, one State Department official acknowledges that two tons of war gold were sent from Frankfurt to New York in 1952. How much of that shipment remains is unknown, he said.

In the British Foreign Office report issued in September, officials defended the Tripartite Commission’s inaction by concluding that any melted dental or jewelry gold was dwarfed by the amount belonging to European treasuries.

“The total value of the private claims provable by documentary evidence would be small in comparison to the government claims,” the Foreign Office concluded.

To Jewish leaders, said Steinberg, the message was clear. “It would be inconvenient for them to test. Well, history is inconvenient.”

For 50 years, the Tripartite Commission scattered its gold to the national treasuries of Europe. Like the gold dust blown out into the Mexican desert in B. Traven’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” it now belongs to the ages.

The little that remains obsesses Jewish leaders. The WJC has asked the commission to set aside a percentage to fund convalescent homes, nursing services and food banks for Holocaust survivors. “It’s a symbolic measure of justice,” Steinberg said.

Even symbols have obstacles. The commission is mandated only to return gold to national treasuries. Giving a portion to Holocaust victims, a State Department official said, would require rewriting the commission’s charter--a move European governments would “not look on too kindly.”

Until the last bars are shipped out, the Tripartite Commission’s cache will remain below Liberty Street. Stacked in a concrete compartment the size of a shower stall, protected by a steel cage and three combination locks, the ingots await their new owners.

‘If Only There Is Something Left’

Elizabeth Trilling-Grotch is putting her house up for sale. Money has been tight since her husband, Stanley, died earlier this year. Her daughters are grown, so she is looking for smaller quarters. But she would prefer not to move.

“If only there is something left,” she sighed after meeting with WJC officials in New York.

The wish does not make it so. After 50 years, “to think it’s still there, maybe that’s being unrealistic.”

If it might mend history, she would send the entire account to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel. “I could live without it if it would serve a purpose,” she said, putting on her coat.

On Madison Avenue again, well-dressed couples brushed by her as she stopped at a chocolatier’s gaudily appointed window. She peered at the foil-wrapped candies, opulent trinkets for a life she may never taste.

The sight was all she could afford. She moved on.

Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.