Paying for Auschwitz

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After my great-uncle survived Auschwitz and came to America in the late 1940s, he got a job selling shoes in Braintree, Mass. He had been a lawyer in Germany, and when the owner of the shoe shop saw that his new salesman was able and educated, he offered him the position of store manager. But my great-uncle declined. He said it was enough for him to be in America and to be able to sell shoes. And so he did, until the day he died.

I thought of him last week when people were comparing the mass murders in Kosovo to the Holocaust--how inept the comparisons were, vile as Slobodan Milosevic is. The Holocaust has no analog; this is why, almost 60 years after the fact, it is still impossible to fit it into the rest of history.

My great-uncle also came to mind when I read a recent story about the release of documents by Deutsche Bank A.G., Germany's biggest bank, that showed it had helped finance the building of Auschwitz. Deutsche Bank produced this information in connection with its negotiations with Holocaust survivors who are suing the bank. Deutsche Bank thus joined such other European institutions facing lawsuits as Siemens, I.G. Farben and the banks of Austria and Switzerland. The Swiss banks have already agreed to pay $1.25 billion in claims over gold deposits, and Deutsche Bank may end up paying much more.

This is what the Holocaust seems to have come to--an exchange of dollars for unspeakable suffering and loss, and a shared pretense that money is an instrument of justice. In cases where restitution is at issue--the return of artworks, homes and property to their rightful owners, for instance--financial repayment may come close to settling the score; but even there, no compensation would take account of what it cost to be dragged away from one's home or to have had one's beloved possessions seized by the state.

In cases where companies like Volkswagen, Krupp and Daimler-Benz are being sued for back wages for using slave labor during the war, people are asking to be compensated for work they would never have done willingly in the first place; no justice there. As for repayment for pain, how does that work? Stolen property may be returned, but how would a young banker in modern Germany have compensated my great-uncle for the loss of his family, his ambition and his spirit?

This point is being made obliquely by Jewish groups and individuals who abjure these offers of institutional compensation and even gently condemn those whose accept them. In TIME last December, Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, himself a Holocaust survivor, said those "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." Yet the plain, if unsatisfactory, truth is that money is the most tangible instrument of compensation that society has at its disposal. Verbal apologies have been proffered in recent years by institutions, and by such nations as France and Poland, but sincere as they may be, they leave no evidence of penalty. Dollars, at least, may pay for a child's education, a mortgage, an operation, a coat.