Restrictions Mire Holocaust Reparations

What Linda Zabolski wants seems simple enough: official recognition of her family’s suffering.

Something to serve as an apology for the murder of her grandfather--a strapping blond tuba player who adored the marches of John Philip Souza and died under a cloud of Nazi gas at the Monowitz death camp.

Something that would acknowledge the damage done to her mother, a beauty who served the French Resistance, then hid with her own mother for two years in the cellar of a farmhouse filled with the stench of their own waste.

Zabolski, 43, is continuing the bureaucratic fight her late mother started--a quest for reparations from the German government. If she succeeds, she will receive less than $4,000, a symbolic lump sum.

Her mother, Edith Trager, applied in 1993 to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany’s Article 2 Fund, the third and final major program offering German government compensation to Jewish Holocaust victims. In support of her claim, she wrote out painful reminiscences of her life in the dank cellar, and even obtained a letter of support from the woman who hid her from the Nazis in the mountains above Nice.

But Trager died in 1995, her claim held up like thousands of others by both an overwhelmed Claims Conference and demanding restrictions the German government has placed on payouts.

As many as 60,000 applicants still await responses on their Article 2 claims. Some have been disqualified because they make too much money. Others lack what Germany deems adequate proof of the atrocities they suffered.

“For me, I want closure,” Zabolski said as she pored over photos of her mother. The earliest shows a dashing 19-year-old woman in Paris, not long before she became a Resistance fighter. And, toward the end, an embittered woman on Zabolski’s Foothill Ranch terrace with diseased lungs and a weak heart.

Zabolski’s struggle is similar to those of many others who have sought reparations since the German government began doling out so-called “blood money.” It is a lengthy and traumatic quest by mostly elderly people for a tiny gesture of recognition.

Those who somehow have saved papers from that chaotic and death-filled time can hope for a lump sum followed by a monthly pension of about $300 that the Article 2 Fund offers. Zabolski, however, is one of a small class of people granted the go-ahead to pursue the lump sum on behalf of a deceased parent.

Her claim, like scores of thousands more, is troubled: Trager’s role in the Resistance could lead Germany to deem her a combatant instead of a persecuted Jew. And in any case, the Claims Conference--a group of Jewish organizations assigned to administer the German funds--says that to meet Germany’s restrictions, it must have official proof of Trager’s ordeal.

“When you were in hiding, you destroyed your own documents,” said Zabolski, an artist and movie extra. “And at the end, the French government didn’t give you a little certificate saying, ‘Congratulations, you survived being in hiding.’ ”

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Zabolski’s grandparents met in Russia at a St. Petersburg park. Georges Urwicz played tuba in the czar’s orchestra and Anna watched from a park bench. “He was blond, blue-eyed, 6 feet 5 inches--Hitler’s Aryan dream, but he was a Jew,” Zabolski said.

They married, and after a stint in Georges’ native Poland immigrated to Paris. The Urwiczes who stayed behind ended up in the Warsaw ghetto, where “60-some members of the family were annihilated,” Zabolski said.

Georges Urwicz built a successful textile business in Paris that he was forced to give up under the 1940 Nazi occupation. He fled to Marseilles, where his wife and daughter--18-year-old Edith--joined him, smuggled in a freight car hauling cigarette cartons.

“To this day, I become stressed and I get angina at the sight of freight trains,” Edith Trager wrote in her claim for Article 2 compensation.

The family eventually fled to Nice, where Edith befriended a group of well-to-do non-Jews, spending her days on the beach of the Riviera town.

It wasn’t until 1943, when her father was captured by the Gestapo and deported to Monowitz, a subsidiary of Auschwitz, that Edith learned her friends were in the Resistance. The news of her father’s capture came from her boyfriend, Rene Borghini, a Catholic from a wealthy Monte Carlo family who led the local Resistance movement.

Edith joined them, assumed a false identity and led a double life, appearing on Borghini’s arm at the Monte Carlo Opera and picking up and delivering messages for the Resistance.

After a close call, during which the Gestapo searched her Monte Carlo hotel room as she hid in the restaurant below, Edith was spirited to L’Abadie, high in the mountains above Nice, according to an essay written by Trager in the 1950s.

At L’Abadie, another Resistance worker, Jeanne Lombard, hid Edith and her mother, Anna, in a farm cellar until 1944.

In Trager’s claim application, she describes the unheated cellar without light or plumbing.

After France was liberated in 1944, Edith made a weekly trek to Marseilles to meet the weakened camp deportees as they arrived on ships from Odessa. Her father was never among them, and word finally came from a survivor that he had died in a Nazi gas chamber.

“My nightmare NEVER STOPS,” Trager wrote in her claims application. “I see my beloved father and others treated worse than cattle, I feel terror as I am squeezed in between cartons of cigarette paper. I see my dear father being herded into the gas chamber, his body thrown into the ovens and his soul leaving Auschwitz through its chimneys.”

Zabolski pores over her mother’s words. She has heard these stories so many times.

“My mother adored her father,” Zabolski said. “When she was dying, she was calling out for him. . . . I’m completing this for her. If I get a little something, I won’t think of it coming from the Germans, I’ll think of it coming from her.”

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The 1993 Article 2 Fund was created as an amendment to the 1990 German reunification treaty, to compensate Jewish victims of Nazi persecution who had previously fallen through the cracks.

As of April 30, a total of 95,138 people, most living in the U.S. and Israel, had applied to the fund, said Claims Conference spokesman George Berman. Of these claims, about 27,000 had been approved.

Delays and long silences have stemmed from the tremendous research that accompanies most claims, Berman said. Also, Claims Conference officials will meet with the German government in August in an attempt to loosen eligibility criteria.

As a result, caseworkers have turned down few claims, choosing instead to wait. However, Berman said he expects only about 13,000 of the more complicated claims to be cleared for payment.

The criteria have been sharply criticized. Individual applicants must earn less than $16,000 a year and couples less than $21,000. Applicants must be Jewish victims of Nazi persecution who spent either six months or more in a concentration camp, 18 months or more in a ghetto or 18 months in hiding.

In March, Claims Conference representatives came to Los Angeles to interview 1,000 applicants who lacked full written proof, Zabolski among them. Through the partition, Zabolski said, she heard elderly survivors weeping when pressed for documentation of their trials.

Researchers seek papers such as school and property records, or government rosters that documented ghetto residents. But those are often impossible to find. Zabolski’s mother submitted a letter neatly printed by Lombard, who hid her and her mother in the cellar. But that letter is insufficient proof, according to a terse note from a Claims Conference caseworker.

“I think that it teases survivors, to establish a program and then hold up a series of frustrating and at times arbitrary eligibility requirements,” said William R. Marks, a Washington-based attorney whose practice is devoted to finding reparations for Holocaust survivors.

For Zabolski to have to prove her mother’s hiding is “absurd,” he said. “How do you prove you were in hiding? It’s a contradiction in terms.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, has fought to ease the German requirements and get faster responses from the Claims Conference.

“We collectively have a tremendous responsibility to these people in their last years and we’re failing them miserably,” he said.

If the Claims Conference does find enough documentation in the Trager case, Berman said, the most Zabolski can expect is about $3,700.

It is not a sum that would make much difference in her life, but Zabolski will not settle for less than a resolution. “I want an explanation that makes sense for why she didn’t qualify,” Zabolski said. “And I want it to come from the top.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Filing a Claim

Jewish victims who want to file claims against Germany for Nazi persecution must be able to prove any one of the following:

* Spent six months or more imprisoned in concentration or forced labor camp

* Imprisoned for 18 months or more in a ghetto

* In hiding for 18 months or more

* Was younger than 18, separated from family and living under false identity for 18 months or more

CLAIMANT MUST ALSO PROVE:

* Has not received prior compensation exceeding 35,000 Deutsche marks

* Annual income does not exceed $16,000 (single) and $21,000 (married)

WHO TO CONTACT

Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany Inc.

Address: 15 E. 26th St., Room 906, New York, NY 10010

Telephone: (212) 696-4944

E-mail: ClaimsCon@aol.com

Source: Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany Inc.