GERMANY: Payment, But Not Expiation

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In a guarded and secluded country inn near The Hague, Germans and Jews met as equals across a conference table last week for the first time in 18 years. In the intervening years, Hitler's Germans had killed 6,000,000 Jews. Now the new Jewish state of Israel asked $1 billion to pay the cost of resettling the half-million Jews who had escaped Hitler and moved on to Israel. The meeting was cold and proper. The German delegation promised "most careful consideration."

The real passion came not from Germany, which promises to pay some reparations, but from Israel, which wants redress but does not want the payments to be considered expiation. Many Israelis still carry concentration-camp numbers tattooed on their arms; almost all mourn murdered relatives. The prospect of sitting down with the Germans to discuss a financial settlement seemed degrading. But Israel, financially desperate and short of everything, could not even afford pride and sentiment. Opposition newspapers reprinted old photographs of naked, emaciated concentration-camp victims stacked, like cordwood, for burning, but there was little else to say.