Survivors to Collect on Debt Long Overdue

The hand of fate that twice reached out to shield Yevgenia Grinberg from Nazi firing squads may once again be visible in the twilight of a life that has been lapped by waves of cruelty and kindness.

Alone in a one-room apartment and living on $60 a month, the 64-year-old retired scientist has just been promised compensation for her World War II suffering by the German government, which will pay her and other Holocaust survivors $140 a month.

Bonn’s decision to extend pensions to the East European victims of Nazi crimes more than half a century after they were committed might be seen by more embittered survivors as woefully too little and way too late.

But for Grinberg and at least 1,000 other Russian citizens who emerged from the ghettos and death camps alive, only to face deprivation and discrimination in the Soviet Union, the pensions due to begin this summer could make the difference between bare existence and living.

“Time is of the essence, as every day we draw a little closer to death,” Grinberg observes with resigned serenity, saying she hopes the promised assistance will allow her to buy the medicine she needs to soothe her ulcers, kidney ailments and lifelong nervous condition.

Few among the likely recipients make light of the material value of the impending reparations, because 250 German marks--about $140--remains a princely sum for most in Russia.

Money Refocuses Attention on Victims

But the belated compensation has also refocused attention on the plight of Nazi victims from the former Soviet Union for whom betrayal, fear and mistreatment continued for decades after their liberation. Anti-Semitism has long been prevalent in this native land of the pogrom, and paranoid Soviet leaders often suspected anyone who survived Nazi detention of having collaborated with the enemy.

“We have been victims of every political change this century,” says Semyon Zeltser, a 66-year-old retired economist who spent three harrowing years as a youth in the Odessa ghetto and a professional life hobbled by anti-Semitic discrimination. Now scraping by on a pension of $65 a month, he too expects to qualify for the German compensation once documentation of eligibility is completed this summer.

Holocaust survivors in Russia and other former republics and satellites of the Soviet Union were never eligible for German reparations during the Communist era because Kremlin leaders were too proud to accept charity from the capitalist successors of the defeated German people. Instead, the murder, torture and degradation inflicted on Soviet citizens by the Nazis became taboo subjects because they were disturbing reminders of the perfidy of Soviet leaders.

In 1939, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin had forged a nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler that carved up the countries of Eastern Europe between them. But the Germans broke that secret agreement less than two years later with their surprise invasion of the western Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

First in a Lifetime of Close Calls

In the first of a lifetime of breathtakingly close calls and tragic coincidences, Grinberg, then 8, and her 15-year-old sister, Roza, had just traveled by train on the day before the invasion from the relative safety of Moscow to what was then the western Soviet republic of Byelorussia to spend the summer with an aunt and uncle in the village of Krasnopolye.

Nazi soldiers quickly engulfed the region, building ghettos in their occupied territory as they swept east and south. Grinberg, racked with fever when soldiers first rounded up the Jews of Krasnopolye, was left behind when her aunt, uncle and sister were arrested--because, she believes, the Germans feared contagion. A subsequent search a few days later landed her in the Krasnopolye ghetto, but with no record of her relation to the other detainees from her family.

That anonymity saved Grinberg when Roza escaped a few weeks later, after whispering her plans to her younger sister and advising her to look for a chance to do the same later.

“They would have interrogated me, or worse, if they had known we were sisters,” Grinberg recalls, expressing her fear of retaliation after the escape.

9-Year-Old Finds Chance to Escape

One night in June 1942, after nearly a year in the ghetto, the skinny 9-year-old found her own chance to slither out to safety through a narrow crawl space below the barracks toilet. The following morning, orders to carry out Hitler’s “final solution” arrived from Germany, and the ghetto’s remaining inmates were lined up and shot.

Grinberg met up with other escapees and spent the summer scavenging food in the surrounding forest but was eventually discovered and turned over to the occupiers by Nazi collaborators. Execution was ordered for the captives, and they were herded to the edge of a ravine on the outskirts of Krasnopolye.

“I don’t remember much of what happened next--I think it is a trick of the subconscious to spare me even more horrible memories,” says Grinberg, who recalls gaining consciousness among a pile of bullet-riddled corpses and crawling out to take refuge in the rubble of a ruined building.

Achingly hungry and cold as autumn descended on the region, Grinberg says, she was near death when a teenage girl found her and smuggled her to the warmth and safety of a non-Jewish home, where she spent the rest of the Nazi occupation in hiding.

“She was like a sister to me for the rest of our lives,” Grinberg says of her rescuer, Zinaida Milnikova, who died last year.

Grinberg returned to Moscow and reunited with her family after the region’s liberation, but all but Roza, who lives in the countryside, are now dead. The aunt and uncle with whom Grinberg had planned to spend the summer of 1941 died before the firing squads, as did the rest of her mother’s Byelorussian family. Her mother died in 1964, and her Polish emigre father--who had been exiled to Siberia before the war--left for Israel in the 1970s and died there in 1984.

Her dark, tiny apartment on the bleak outskirts of Moscow was all Grinberg managed to salvage from a brief marriage. She has no children, and a career in the top-secret nuclear technology industry forced her to cut off ties with her father and other Jewish friends who emigrated to Israel.

For Grinberg and the majority of other Russian Holocaust survivors who live very much like her, the compensation from Germany “will allow them to live out their last days with a degree of dignity that until now has been denied them,” says Tatiana Zhvanetskaya, president of the Moscow Assn. of Jews and herself a survivor of the ghetto in Minsk, the capital of Byelorussia, now Belarus. “This assistance will really mean something to people here, where most of the victims are elderly and getting by on the most miserly of pensions.”

Communist rule and the old Kremlin’s objections to accepting German reparations crumbled more than six years ago, but compensation for former Soviet Jews was stalled until this year by more of Moscow’s political manipulations.

When German negotiators first offered Kremlin leaders the opportunity to take part in the decades-old program of individual reparations in the early 1990s, Zhvanetskaya recalls, Moscow pushed instead for German financing of new housing for hundreds of thousands of Russian troops withdrawing from Eastern Europe and the newly independent former Soviet republics of the Baltic region.

On behalf of the Russians expected to qualify for compensation, Zhvanetskaya’s association is now working with the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany to put in place the mechanics of paying the Holocaust survivors directly so there is no chance the funds go astray or get siphoned off by intermediaries.

“I don’t trust any Soviet government organization, and that’s what we still have, is a Soviet government,” insists the wary Zeltser.

About 18,000 Holocaust survivors are believed to be eligible throughout the former Communist region, and Zhvanetskaya says she expects the 1,000-name Russian list to grow, as Jews who declined to apply for the pensions during the negotiating stage become encouraged by the recent agreement.

Requirements for Receiving Funds

Under the terms of the Jan. 12 deal struck between the claims conference and the German government, any person who spent at least six months in a concentration camp or at least 18 months in a ghetto or in hiding in occupied territory should be eligible for the payments.

“These are terms that were agreed for other programs, and they appear to work in other countries, but I’m not sure they are really just,” says Zeltser, whose native Odessa region had its Jewish heritage obliterated by the war. “For some people, even one day in a death camp was enough to inflict emotional wounds that would hurt for a lifetime.”