August 9



USA:

Justice for 'Gold Train' Victims


Over the past decade, this nation played a laudable role in helping to
persuade European governments and companies, including recalcitrant Swiss
banks, to live up to their moral duty to settle restitution claims by
Holocaust survivors even when their legal liability was murky.
Regrettably, the Justice Department has taken a much less high-minded
approach to a three-year-old lawsuit by elderly survivors over America's
mishandling of valuables the Nazis collected from Hungarian Jews and then
loaded onto a train heading for Austria.

Instead of facing up to responsibility for the contents of the "Hungarian
Gold Train," which the American Army took for safekeeping in 1945, the
government has raised a host of technical legal defenses seeking to void
the claims, or at least delay the moment of reckoning. This is
particularly dismaying since essential facts aren't really in dispute.

They were documented five years ago in a report by a special presidential
advisory commission that detailed "an unexplained departure" from
America's otherwise stellar record of adhering to laws and regulations
calling for the preservation of victims' assets and their return to the
country from which they were seized. Some of the choicest Gold Train loot
was either commandeered by high-ranking officers or sold for personal use
by Army personnel. Other valuables were auctioned in New York and the
proceeds given to a United Nations refugee agency. Still other property
was stolen from the warehouse. Two suitcases of gold dust simply vanished.
Meanwhile, emphatic calls by the Hungarian government and Hungarian Jewish
groups for return of the train's contents were ignored.

The opening of court-ordered mediation sessions last week provides a new
opening for a fair and expeditious settlement. Attorney General John
Ashcroft ought not hesitate to seize it, much as 17 Republican and
Democratic senators wisely counseled him in a recent letter.

(source: Editorial, New York Times)





CALIFORNIA:

Slave laborers not "jumping with joy"


Frieda Moldavan had to wait 60 years, but last week she was finally
"compensated" for digging German anti-tank trenches outside Budapest in
the bitter winter of 1944.

Moldavan received a check for just over $3,000, the same amount paid to
the other 4,325 former Jewish slave laborers living in California, thus
closing one more chapter in the long and contentious history of
post-Holocaust reparations.

The check came from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against
Germany, part of a $1.3 billion fund established by the German government
and some 6,000 German businesses.

A similar amount was paid to the former slave laborers about four years
ago, and the current payment represents the second and final installment,
said Mark Rothman, Holocaust Services Advocate at Bet Tzedek legal
services.

However, Moldavan, 77, said the current check was the only payment she had
ever received.

The small town where she was born was then a part of Czechoslovakia and is
now part of the Ukraine. She was 17 when she and 150 other women were
given their shovels, and to this day, Moldavan remembers the cold, the
hunger, the exhaustion and the dead, and the exact dimensions of the
trenches.

"Each day, each of us had to dig a trench 10 feet long and 3 feet deep,"
she said.

Her husband Max was also a slave laborer. He was born in Sighet, Romania,
living on the same street as Elie Wiesel and his family, until the area
was incorporated into Hungary in 1940.

In 1943, he was sent to a Hungarian labor camp to build an airport, and
the following year he was shipped to the Polish border to construct
bunkhouses for the German army.

He has mixed feelings about his $3,000 check from the Claims Commission,
which will go mainly to buying medications.

"If I weren't sick and old, I wouldn't accept it," Max Moldavan said.
"Five years ago, the Hungarians sent me $50 to pay for the death of my
mother in Auschwitz, and I sent it back."

Rose Niederman was 15 years old in 1942 and celebrating the first Seder
night with her family, when soldiers broke into her house and told them to
pack up what they could in 10 minutes.

The home was in a small Czech town, but Niederman had a hard time keeping
track of her nationality. "Every other month we were part of another
country - first Czechoslovakia, then Hungary, Romania, Russia, and now the
Ukraine," she said.

Most of the family was killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but Rose was sent to
Germany to work in a factory manufacturing bullets for the Wehrmacht.

"We worked seven days a week, but don't ask the hours, we didn't know
whether it was day or night," she remembered. The food? "Don't even ask,"
she advised, her voice frequently overcome with emotion.

Now 76, Niederman can use every penny of the payment. Her monthly income
consists of a $700 Social Security check, $100 welfare check, and $60 in
food stamps.

She hopes that the $3,000 will stretch to repair her windows, pay for
arthritis medication, visit her sister who is in an Alzheimer's
institution in Israel, and maybe buy a little outfit for her grandchild in
Florida.

The money is certainly welcome but she said, "They can't pay for what I
went through; they can't pay for my dead family."

Si Frumkin was born in Kovno, Lithuania. When he was 10, he and his
parents were rounded up and sent to the Kovno ghetto, and at age 13, he
was shipped to a Dachau satellite camp and assigned to a German
construction company building an underground aircraft factory for future
jet planes.

He worked at heavy labor 12 hours a day, seven days a week, alongside his
father, who died three weeks before liberation by American troops.

The place was run by the Phillipp (ok) Holzmann Company, now the biggest
construction firm in Germany, and Frumkin has good reason to remember the
name.

"I was shocked to hear sometime ago that an American subsidiary of the
same company had gotten the contract to build the US World War II memorial
in Washington," he said. "I fired off letters of protest, but nobody
cared."

Frumkin came to the United States in 1949, became a businessman and one of
the earliest leaders of the Soviet Jewry movement.

He once figured out that if he had been paid the prevailing minimum wage
for his labors by Holzmann, plus accumulated interest, he would be owed
$85,000.

So while he accepted the $3,000 check, "I'm not jumping up and down with
joy," said Frumkin, now 73.

At an earlier point in his life, he said, "I didn't want any German money.
But now I feel that at least they have apologized for their crimes.
Holland and France have never apologized for collaborating with the Nazis.
Japan has never apologized for its war crimes."

(source: Jerusalem Post)





BRITAIN:

Lampshade 'made from the skins of Jewish Holocaust victims' to be sold


A lampshade allegedly made from the skins of Jews who died in the
Holocaust may be sold at auction, despite the protests of Jewish groups.

The lamp forms part of a controversial collection of artefacts assembled
by Robert Lenkiewicz, a leading portrait artist who once famously embalmed
the body of a tramp.

Jewish leaders fear the lamp may now be sold to the highest bidder to help
pay off 2m debts owed by the Lenkiewicz estate and accrued by the artist,
who died in 2002. Jewish groups say the lamp should be buried with
dignity.

Most of the gruesome collection, which also features the skeleton of a
16th-century witch, will go under the hammer in the autumn as the artist's
estate attempts to clear the debts.

Lenkiewicz was an acclaimed artist whose subjects included Michael Foot,
Billy Connolly and Terry Waite and whose paintings sold for tens of
thousands of pounds.

His family have reluctantly agreed to the sale after failing to raise
enough money through other means. His brother, Jon Lenkiewicz, said: "The
sale runs completely counter to Robert's intentions, but the costs are
pretty enormous and the claims are large. It's a tragedy. It would have
been so good to preserve everything."

Neither the lampshade nor the body of the tramp is part of the forthcoming
auction, but some fear that they are bound to reach the market eventually.

The estate's executor, Peter Walmsley, admitted that the lamp might have
to be sold eventually. "It's not the sort of thing we would put into an
auction sale lightly," he said. "But it may have to be sold at some stage.
I may not have a choice about it. Sales will be made to meet the claims of
the creditors."

Jewish leaders have warned that any sale of the lamp - whether authentic
or not - would be "revolting and inhumane". They called for its burial and
a promise from the estate that it will never go into auction.

Lenkiewicz claimed the lamp was made in Auschwitz in 1940, but Holocaust
experts dispute this. Lord Janner, chairman of the Holocaust Educational
Trust, questioned the lamp's authenticity. But he added: "If it is real,
to sell it would be the most revolting and inhumane way to raise funds."

As well as his bizarre collection, Lenkiewicz also left 15 children - just
two of whom were from his three marriages.

Once all the debts have been cleared, the remains of the estate will be
passed to the Lenkiewicz Foundation, set up to protect the artist's legacy
and look after his collection. The foundation's trustees now fear that
little will remain. Many of his paintings have already been sold, as has a
large proportion of his vast book collection.

A large outstanding income tax bill makes up the majority of the debt, but
creditors also include those who have paid for paintings that Lenkiewicz
never got the chance to finish. Mr Walmsley needs to raise approximately
2m to cover all the creditors' claims.

Lenkiewicz, the son of Jewish refugees, was born in London during the
Second World War. He went to St Martin's art college at the age of 16 and
later attended the Royal Academy. After moving to Plymouth in the early
1960s, he took over warehouses in order to house the tramps and alcoholics
he had befriended.

Items included in the auction, organised by Bearne's of Exeter in October,
are understood to include an ornate coffin, a series of skulls and the
skeleton of a 16th-century woman hanged for witchcraft.

(source: The Independent)