A Modern-Day Schindler Faces the Consequences

Only 19 months ago, Christoph Meili says, he knew no Jews. Oh, he’d seen a rabbi once or twice but had no idea that Jews are, as he now puts it, just “normal people.”

Not surprising that he knew no one, given that he is a Christian who’d always lived in Switzerland, a country with a population of 7 million and only 18,000 of them Jewish.

Yet today, Meili is being hailed by Jewish groups worldwide as a hero.

He is the soft-spoken former security guard for the Union Bank of Switzerland who in January 1997 saved from the shredder damning documents relating to the seizure of assets rightfully belonging to Holocaust victims.

Since then, he has visited the former concentration camp at Auschwitz with Holocaust survivors, has danced the hora at a “Salute to Israel” celebration in Beverly Hills and has been feted at a Kristallnacht remembrance in New Jersey.

On Sunday, Meili was honored at a yizkor (memorial service) at Temple Beth Israel in L.A.

“He did what he felt was the right thing to do--at great personal cost,” said Kal Berson, saluting Meili at the observance, which was sponsored by the Lodzer Organization, a group of survivors from Lodz, Poland.

Indeed, after going public with the incriminating bank documents, Meili was fired from his job, shunned by friends and family, and targeted by death threats. He fled with his wife and two young children to this country, where they have been granted permanent residency by President Clinton.

The articulate, bespectacled 30-year-old--who seems more Clark Kent than Superman--observes that he is “the first Swiss man in history to get political asylum in the United States.”

But “I’m no hero,” he insisted during an interview before the service. “I know it was the right thing to do. I’m a regular, normal person. I say everybody can do something. Everybody can stop things happening.”

Hero or not, he played a key role in bringing about a $1.25-billion settlement with Holocaust survivors, their families and Jewish groups, reached last week with Swiss banks.

Starting over in a new country and having to learn a new language has been tough. Meili now has a job as a security guard in a Manhattan high-rise; he and his family live in New Jersey, in a small apartment provided rent-free by a grateful Holocaust survivor.

The “1939” Club, an organization of survivors and their descendants in Los Angeles, hopes to “raise money to send [Meili] to college,” says club President William Elperin, an attorney from L.A. who escorted Meili during his weekend visit.

Christoph Meili’s story began the night of Jan. 8, 1997, as he was making his routine rounds at the bank in Zurich and passed the shredder room.

“I quickly take a look inside,” he recalls, “and what I immediately see are two big containers filled with old books. I never saw them shredding old books. Maybe then I think maybe this is not my business. . . .”

Still, “I feel [there was] something going on.”

Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, had visited Switzerland as part of his 2-year-old campaign to retrieve Jewish assets from Swiss banks, and the investigation had been heating up.

“I go back and take a better look,” Meili says. “I was shocked” to find the books were earmarked for the shredder. Only a month earlier, Switzerland had passed a law forbidding destruction of World War II-era documents that might pertain to Holocaust assets.

Meili stuffed one book and a 60-page document under his clothing and smuggled them out. Looking through the document, he “found a lot of [Jewish-owned] properties from Berlin turned over [to the Nazis] under pressure” or confiscated during the war.

Only three months earlier, he’d seen “Schindler’s List,” and he began reflecting on the film, which included scenes of Nazis stealing valuables from Jews. “I have this in my mind. I remember, too, Schindler did something. I have the feeling I also have to do something.

“The next day I go back. I see they have shredded everything. I was really shocked. I searched in the garbage and found two books too big for shredding.”

With the three books and the property document in hand, Meili called the Tagesanzeiger, a newspaper in Zurich which had been running stories about accusations against a number of Swiss banks. He asked to speak to the reporter on the story.

“I called four or five times,” he says, but was always put off. “I don’t understand.”

He conferred with his Italian-born wife, Giussepina, and they agreed that he should contact a Jewish cultural organization in Zurich. “They called me back and said, ‘Yes, bring it.’ I have a good feeling. My job is done.”

But Werner Rom, a leader of the Jewish community, was having second thoughts. “He told me, ‘This is dynamite,’ too hot to handle,” and he was turning the evidence over to the Zurich police. “At this moment I was not too happy. I realized the police, they work together with the bank. I’m concerned the story is going under the table and I end up with big troubles.”

He decided to contact a Jewish newspaper in Zurich. The next day, he took part in a press conference with Jewish leaders. “Then the whole story exploded. Everybody comes, the whole world” to his door.

At first, the mainstream press was very positive. But, Meili says, anti-Semitism is rampant in Switzerland and attacks soon began. Stories began suggesting that he had been paid by Jews, that he was a self-aggrandizing publicity seeker, an Israeli spy. “Basically, the Swiss people then turned.” The death threats, the kidnapping threats began.

And police began a criminal investigation of Meili (since dropped) on charges that he’d broken bank secrecy laws. He began thinking, “One day I may have to go to prison, so nobody [will] give me a job. In Switzerland, they don’t support me.

“The minute you touch the banks in Switzerland, you touch the country. The banks use this to turn the country against me--I’m a traitor, I’m paid by the Jews, I’ve stolen the documents. . . . The tabloids, they also make big stories about the ‘dark side’ of Mr. Meili. You destroy somebody in this way.”

(When the family left Switzerland, it had to leave a number of things behind, including its pet guinea pig. One paper ran a headline: “Meili Famiy Cruel to Animals.”)

Meili flew to the United States to testify before the Senate Banking Committee, which is headed by Alfonse D’Amato of New York, who’d been keeping pressure on the Swiss to reach a settlement in a class-action suit filed by survivors and Jewish groups even before Meili’s disclosures.

“This is the point at which I realize I can’t go back,” Meili says. “I ask Sen. D’Amato, ‘Please help me’ ” to get permanent residency.

The attacks in Switzerland continued, but within the Jewish community, Meili was emerging as a hero. “Little checks” began arriving in the mail. “A lot of people say ‘thank you for what you did for my parents.’ They give me shoes for the kids, clothes. They send a big box of toys to my lawyer’s office.” The Anti-Defamation League helped him pay his bills and ship his belongings to the United States.

Elperin notes that Meili “has almost a similar situation to when the [Holocaust] survivors came to America” after World War II--jobless, with no money and no knowledge of the language. “It’s easy for them to empathize with his plight.”

Meili had filed a $2-billion lawsuit against Union Bank of Switzerland, a lawsuit he agreed to drop last week, a condition set forth by the bank for the the settlement with the victims to be finalized.

“It’s important that the big case comes to an end,” Meili said. “I can work. These [survivors] in their 70s and 80s, they need the money now.”

As he starts a new life in America, Meili says he is not angry at the Swiss. “They have to be forgiven because they do not know what they do.”

Returning to Switzerland is not an option, he says. “The problem is when I go back nobody gives me job. The Swiss banks are losing the whole battle, and I’m winning, so the Swiss press are not so happy with me.”

Perhaps in time he will apply for American citizenship. If he gets the opportunity to go to college, he might study computer science (before becoming a security guard, he sold computers and repaired radios and TVs).

At a luncheon following the service at Temple Beth Israel, Elperin introduced Meili as a Christian who did the right thing despite terrible pressures. “Christoph’s own father said to him, ‘Are you crazy? Why are you helping the Jews?’ ”

“My mother believed all the time it’s right,” Meili says. “My father believed the press.” But since the settlement, he adds, his father has been more forgiving.

One by one, temple members came by to greet Meili. “I wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart.” . . . “May I shake the hand of a real hero? I was in a concentration camp. . . .”

Lodzer Organization president Harry Eisen presented Meili with a $5,000 check and reminded the luncheon audience that Meili still needs financial help.

Finally, there was a joke about making Meili a real Jew by having him circumcised. Meili just looked puzzled. That word is not yet in his English vocabulary.

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* Contributions to the Meili Education Fund may be sent to the 1939 Club, 8950 W. Olympic Blvd., Suite 2248, Beverly Hills 90211.