Restitution, But At What Price?

Bernard Lieberman was reared a child of privilege in a small town outside Lodz, Poland. He was one of nine children in an Orthodox Jewish family that lived largely off the money of affluent relatives and regularly opened up its home to poor neighbors. But that comfortable life swiftly ended on Sept. 1, 1939, when the Nazis stormed into Poland. Only 19, Bernard was soon separated from his siblings and transported from camp to camp, doing time in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Bernard (who later changed his last name from Lieberman to Lee) made it out of the war alive, but he lost his entire family. Now, like many survivors, he is fighting to get something back. In October he joined a class action filed in the Federal District Court of New York against Dresdner Bank, where a wealthy family member had an account. "There were 6 million people who were murdered, and every family had something," says Lee. "Our things do not belong to them, and justice will be done when they are given back."

Demands for justice from Holocaust survivors like Lee are steadily mounting. In August, Switzerland's two largest banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion to settle wartime claims against them. Since then no fewer than 10 class actions have been filed against European companies that do business in the U.S. Some of these are claims for individual accounts confiscated by banks in Germany and Austria. Others charge that major corporations such as Krupp, Volkswagen and Daimler-Benz profited from slave labor during the wartime years and should pay billions in back wages and other compensation. The issue of Holocaust reparations was raised again at a conference in Washington last week sponsored by the State Department and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where representatives from 44 countries discussed the restitution of artworks and other Holocaust-era assets.

Amid all this, however, a small but growing segment of the survivor community is questioning whether the campaign for restitution has gone too far and is sending the wrong message. "This is not how the survivors want the Holocaust to be remembered," says Roman Kent, chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. "The image and memory of those killed have been put in the background, and all I hear about now is the glitter of gold." Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, voices a similar concern: "Survivors who have claims deserve to bring them forward, but it's at a heavy price. The next generation will believe it's all about money."

Or all about lawyers. With so many suits, competing attorneys have taken to squabbling publicly over how to proceed and how to divvy up the spoils. In recent months attorneys have crisscrossed the U.S. and Europe to pack their rosters with survivors; in some cases they have rushed to file competing claims against the same company in different states.