Brussels
Photo: Index Open
Belgium to pay Holocaust survivors
Belgium's bank, government announce $170 million in restitution for the Jewish community and families of Holocaust survivors whose property and goods were looted by Nazi occupiers
BRUSSELS, Belgium - David Susskind survived the Holocaust by fleeing to Switzerland, eventually joining the French Resistance. When he returned to Belgium after the war, he had nothing.
His mother, a widow, died in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Strangers were living in his family home in Antwerp. The local grocer greeted him with shock, saying, "You're still alive?"
"We lost everything. There was nothing," said Susskind, now 82.
On Tuesday, Belgium's banks and government sought to make material amends, announcing $170 million in restitution for the Jewish community and families of Holocaust survivors whose property and goods were looted by Nazi occupiers.
Overall, $54 million will be paid to individual claimants, with the rest going to a Jewish trust that will help the poor and keep the memory of the horrors of World War II alive.
"In a certain way, justice has been done. Unfortunately, there are people who never came back" from the Nazi death camps, said Eli Ringer, the co-chair of the committee on the restitution of Jewish assets.
Some 50,000 Jews lived in Belgium in the 1930s and about half died in the Holocaust.
Last year, Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt apologized for the involvement of Belgian authorities in the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps.
After the Nazi invasion in May 1940, the Belgian government fled to Britain, but instructed civil servants who stayed to work with the Nazis to keep services running and prevent the economic breakdown that occurred during the German occupation in World War I.
That often led to Belgian officials collaborating with the persecution of Jews, though the resistance movement was also strong and underground networks to save Jews were more successful than in many occupied nations.
Belgium is facing 5,210 outstanding claims for restitution stemming from the Holocaust. From those, 162 amount to more than $30,000.
'Cowardliness of our administration'
Of the total payout, $69.8 million will come from the Belgian authorities and $85 million from banks. Most of the remainder will come from insurance companies.
Susskind, who has worked for the Jewish cause since the war, did not file an individual claim.
"The point is to rebuild a Jewish community like we had before the war," he said in a telephone interview. "For suffering, there is no price."
The Belgian deal was the latest successful effort by Holocaust victims to win compensation. The German government has paid more than $60 billion to Jewish victims or their families since the first deal was negotiated by the World Jewish Congress in the 1950s.
In the 1990s, Swiss banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion on dormant accounts left by Holocaust victims. A decade-long legal battle in the United States against European insurance companies, accused of refusing to pay on policies to victims or their beneficiaries, was settled this year for $175 million.
For Belgium, the compensation decision was another opportunity to come to terms with a dark chapter of its history.
Last year, a government-backed report blamed Belgian authorities and the ruling elite for collaborating with the Nazi persecution of Jews.
The head of the Senate condemned the "cowardliness of our administration" during the 1940-1944 occupation.
Jewish citizens were forced at first to be registered. Then they were obligated to wear yellow stars, and schools and hospitals were segregated. Raids soon rounded up Jews in Belgian cities for deportation to Nazi concentration camps. Some cities helped with the deportations.
With the compensation, "the primary objective was clearly to close a section of the past, which still seems half-open, more than sixty years after the events," the restitution commission said.
The commission, set up by the government, acknowledged that its offer fell short of some expectations, saying it was "frequently confronted with the disappointment of rightful claimants who had plainly expected much bigger indemnification."
