Double Victims: Jews of Eastern Europe

Vera Somerova, 78, has no pictures in her tiny Prague apartment of the day she married professor Walter Eisinger 53 years ago, nor does her neighbor Kurt Kotouc, one of the invited guests.

It is hardly surprising, considering that the wedding took place in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, just north of Prague. Eisinger, a passionate optimist, lived with and taught a group of 14-year-old boys (Kotouc among them) who had already seen their parents shipped off to Auschwitz. Eisinger continually instilled in his charges, as well as his wife, a belief that the war would end and everything would be set right.

It was not to be. The teacher and all but a few of the boys eventually were murdered. Since then, Eisinger’s widow and former student have waited in Prague for some kind of restitution to compensate for the horror that has eaten up their lives like cancer.

They and other Jews throughout the former East Bloc were denied direct compensation from Germany during the Cold War. Since the collapse of communism, some of the governments in the region have made token one-time payments made possible by funds from Germany. These payments, however, are a fraction of what survivors have received in non-communist countries, although East Bloc survivors’ medical needs and economic blight are exponentially worse.

The irony is brutal. While no Holocaust survivor in the Czech Republic receives compensation from the German state, many of their German guards are eligible for special pensions. Tomas Kraus, an attorney and president of the Federation of Czech Jewish Communities, has lobbied the German Embassy several times, hoping to see a modicum of justice served, but to no avail. It has fallen to the Czech government, itself strapped for cash, to make small contributions to those who suffered under the Nazi occupation. Kurt Kotouc, ill and living off a meager pension, has had to turn to Canadian friends for help, and Vera Somerova, who never remarried, lives in lesser circumstances than she did as a high school student in the 1930s. The recent Czech-German declaration will set up a humanitarian fund soon. With luck, it might be disbursing checks in six or seven years.

Victims of the Nazis, victims of postwar politics, these Jews can hope again that their situation will be eased with part of the $180 million awarded thus far by Swiss banks to a circle of eight Jewish organizations specifically for Holocaust survivors. Another larger fund will disburse humanitarian aid worldwide, and may not directly affect them. The World Jewish Restitution Organization will determine how this money is spent. But the eight organizations within this association represent primarily American and Israeli interests. No doubt they face a daunting task: Schools, synagogues, social welfare organizations are in need throughout the world, and many Holocaust survivors outside the former East Bloc still require assistance.

Yet U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce Stuart Eizenstat has rightly called the tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors of Central and Eastern Europe “double victims.” Thousands in the former Soviet Union depend on weekly food packages provided by charities abroad. When they don’t arrive, some of these people survive on a single loaf of bread per day. With their families already living in Israel, there is no one to care for them.

Vera Somerova, Kurt Kotouc and the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe now wait while the eight Jewish organizations divide the Swiss funds. No one is suggesting that these organizations will not try to ameliorate the plight of these people, but not one Holocaust survivor sitting at the negotiating table lives in this region today. The ugly paradox is that while the government in Bonn still refuses to honorably compensate these people, it has fallen to Jewish groups to divide Jewish money stolen by the Nazis and hidden by the Swiss. It should never have come to this. Germany still has a role to play.