Germany to Pay Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Ex-East Bloc

In a path-breaking deal intended to redress wrongs of both the Nazi era and the Cold War, the German government said Monday that it will create a $110-million reparations fund for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who live in countries of the former Eastern Bloc.

The news pleased some prospective recipients but only angered others, who said Bonn had waited indecently long before attempting to compensate them for their suffering.

“It’s 53 years since the war ended. Just think how many people have died,” said Arnold Mostowicz, chairman of the Assn. of Jewish War Veterans in Warsaw.

The payments, expected to begin in July, are intended to correct one of the most bizarre and embarrassing inequities lingering from the Third Reich: Dubious Nazi “victims” such as SS veterans who were wounded in the war have received generous monthly pension payments from the German government, while some of Adolf Hitler’s worst victims--East Europeans who first survived the concentration camps, then endured half a century of communism--have received nothing.

The plight of Holocaust survivors in the former Eastern Bloc also contrasts with the circumstances of those who emigrated to Israel, the U.S. and other Western countries. Those survivors began receiving compensation payments from the German government as early as the mid-1950s.

The Easterners were shut out because of Cold War considerations. East Berlin rejected any role as successor to the Nazi regime and, thus, refused to make compensation payments; Bonn, meanwhile, said it couldn’t get any money through the Iron Curtain.

“You had the perverse situation where people had almost exactly the same experiences, and the one who emigrated to the West got a pension, but the one who stayed on in Moscow or Riga got nothing,” said Rabbi Andrew Baker, a member of the board of the Jewish Claims Conference, the nongovernmental organization that negotiated the new compensation package with the German government.

There are believed to be about 18,000 Jews in the former Eastern Bloc who will now qualify for compensation because they suffered “severe hardship” at the hands of the Nazis, defined as six months in a concentration camp or 18 months in a ghetto or in hiding.

Under the new arrangement, such people are expected to each receive a pension-like stream of payments of 250 German marks, about $140, a month--an attractive sum in countries like Russia, where many elderly people survive on pensions of as little as $60 a month.

“Needless to say, 250 deutsche marks will be a very welcome and considerable addition to the meager pensions for Holocaust survivors still living here,” said Igor G. Zilberg, deputy director of the Moscow Choral Synagogue. “They are old and sick people. . . .”

This package is not intended to cover non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution--Gypsies or homosexuals.

Until recently, a budget-conscious Bonn had insisted that since Germany had already paid more than $55 billion to Holocaust survivors, it would pay no more compensation to individuals. Instead, Germany said it wanted to move on, atoning for Nazi violence in Eastern Europe by helping to restore democracy there and by financing charitable projects such as kindergartens and community centers.

Bonn dropped this policy in August and then faced an aggressive publicity campaign mounted on behalf of the impoverished East European Jews by the American Jewish Committee, which took out large newspaper advertisements, criticizing Germany’s payment of “victims’ pensions” to former SS volunteers while the East European Holocaust victims got not a pfennig. The committee also petitioned U.S. senators to lobby German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Even after Germany agreed to seek ways to compensate the Easterners, it continued for months to insist on making a single, lump-sum payment to survivors, rather than the pension-like restitution that was announced Monday.

This stance has left many Holocaust victims bitter--and deeply suspicious of the German pledge.

“I don’t believe it at all,” said Doris Grozdanovicova, 72, a Czech survivor of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. “I’m so sick of them. They’ve been paying the SS men and their fighters for years, and they’re just waiting for all of us to die.”

In Warsaw, Mostowicz said that the contractual definition of “severe suffering” was narrow enough to exclude many victims. “The number of those who meet the criteria [in Poland] will be no larger than 400, maybe 300,” he predicted. “From the Lodz ghetto--the ghetto which had the most survivors--there are only 40 people all over Poland who are still alive.”