Jewish World Review / Dec. 30, 1998 /11 Teves, 5759
Despite Critics, Nazi Loot Hunt Is Right & Proper
IN CASE YOU HADN'T NOTICED, it's now
fashionable to scorn efforts to recoup
assets stolen by Hitler and Europe from
Holocaust victims and their heirs.
The Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman,
who once led his own delegation to negotiate with Swiss banking
authorities, now charges that the restitution battle is "desecrating
the memory" of the Holocaust.
A few usually crystal-clear writers are weighing in with similarly
murky criticisms. Jonathan Tobin, one of the brighter voices in
American Jewish letters, worries that the rash of "grandstanding"
on Swiss loot, Nazi gold and stolen art is "distorting our view of
the Holocaust." And recently, syndicated
columnist Charles Krauthammer attacked what he called the
"grotesque scramble for money" that would, he cautioned, revive
"Shylockian stereotypes."
Hold on! I agree that the spectacle of shyster lawyers trying to
make a fast buck from Holocaust victims is repugnant. And I'm
not enthralled by the simmering battle among Jewish organizations
for "a piece of the action." As Elan Steinberg of the World Jewish
Congress, which has been in the forefront of the restitution
struggle, puts it: "No one should be making a profit from the
Holocaust."
But that doesn't justify a blanket denunciation of those seeking
truth and justice. The WJC has carried on a tough but honorable
struggle. And not every lawyer involved in class actions is a
money-grubbing ambulance chaser — some actually work pro
bono and others for what is, by current court standards, minimal
amounts. Besides, seeking court intervention is the only way many
victims ever receive any compensation. Anyone who doesn't want
restitution doesn't have to ask for it.
TIME IS NO FACTOR
The fact that 50 years have gone by also is irrelevant. History
doesn't work overnight. As historian Sidney Zabludoff points out,
it took the U.S. more than 30 years to finally come to grips with a
much less heinous crime than the Holocaust — the forced
relocation of Japanese-Americans.
The current battle is not redefining the Holocaust or its
perpetrators — it's underscoring what happened. And its success
will help aging survivors live their last years in dignity, provide for
their heirs and give some financial backbone to future Jewish
education and communal life, providing the ultimate answer to the
Nazis and their helpers: continued Jewish survival.
The weakest — and in many ways most dangerous of the
neo-revisionist arguments is that struggling for truth will create new
anti-Semitism. As former Nazi slave laborer Rudy Kennedy
recently told "60 Minutes," "Anti-Semitism is not created by Jews,
it's created by non-Jews."
Still, if one follows the skewed logic of the critics, then rather than
risk giving anti-Semites a self-fulfilling view of Jews as
gold-grubbers, it's better that the money being sought should
remain with the Swiss bankers who've sat on it for 50 years, or
that the French and Austrians retain the looted paintings and
precious books they hoarded, or that the Norwegians, Dutch,
Croatians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians and
others who profited from the Holocaust, keep the plunder they
hold.
Best yet, wealthy German industry shouldn't pay its former slave
laborers.
As for the aging survivors and their heirs, I guess that giving up the
search means they get to feel morally superior — happy in the
knowledge that they've relieved their critics'
By Richard Z. Chesnoff
I also dismiss the argument that wartime looting is "commonplace."
So is wartime murder. And just as the mechanized slaughter of 6
million Jews was not commonplace killing, so the systematic,
organized despoiling of Europe's Jewish communities and Jews is
not akin to soldiers' pilfering watches from civilian houses.
JWR contributor and veteran journalist
Richard Z. Chesnoff is a senior correspondent at US News
And World Report and a columnist at the NY Daily News. His book on the wartime plunder
of the Jews, Pack of Thieves, will be published by Doubleday in 1999.
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