Restrictions Complicate 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 Sousa and died in a cloud of Nazi gas at the Monowitz death camp in Poland.

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

Zabolski, a 43-year-old Orange County resident, 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 victims of the Holocaust. In support of her claim, she wrote out painful reminiscences of 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 that the German government has placed on payouts.

As many as 60,000 applicants await a response. Some have been disqualified because they make too much money. Others lack what Germany deems adequate proof of atrocities.

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

Zabolski’s struggle is similar to those of many others who have sought reparations.

Those who somehow have saved papers from that chaotic time can hope for a lump sum followed by a monthly pension of about $300. 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 many others, 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.’ ”

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 later emigrated to Paris. Georges Urwicz built a textile business that he was forced to give up under the 1940 Nazi occupation. The family eventually fled to Nice, where Edith befriended a group of well-to-do non-Jews, spending her days on the beaches of the Riviera.

In 1943, when her father was deported to Monowitz, a sub-camp of Auschwitz, Edith learned her friends were in the Resistance. She joined them. After a close call, where the Gestapo searched her Monte Carlo hotel room as she hid in a restaurant below, Edith was spirited to L’Abadie, in the mountains above Nice. A Resistance worker hid Edith and her mother until 1944. After France was liberated, word finally came from a survivor that Edith’s father had died in a Nazi gas chamber.

“My nightmare NEVER STOPS,” Edith 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.”

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

As of April 30, 95,138 people had applied, most of them from the United States and Israel, said Claims Conference spokesman George Berman. About 27,000 claims have been approved.

Claims Conference officials will meet with the German government in August in an attempt to loosen eligibility criteria. The criteria have been sharply criticized. Individuals 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 a thousand applicants who lacked full written proof, Zabolski among them. Through a 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. Zabolski’s mother submitted a letter from the Resistance worker who hid her and her mother. But that letter is insufficient proof, according to a 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, D.C.-based attorney who assists Holocaust survivors.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, has fought to ease the German requirements and get faster responses. “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, Berman said, the most Zabolski can expect is about $3,700.

The money would not 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. And I want it to come from the top.”