|
|
NEWS
French Reparations Committee Receives 75 Requests Per Month
By Arnon Yaffeh, Paris
A 70-year-old Jewish woman living in a Parisian suburb says she doesn't want her neighbors to know she's Jewish. Why? "Besides the fact that there are antisemites living in my wing of the building," she told a reporter from Journal du Dimanche, "if they found out I filed a request for the restoration of property stolen from my parents under the Vichy regime, they'll again say the Jews are addicted to money."
Her parents were transported in a train operated by the French railway company from the Drancy internment camp to Auschwitz, never to return. Until former president Jacques Chirac acknowledged France's accountability for the internment of Jews and their deportation to the death camps, it never occurred to the state to restore the property stolen from the Jews — from apartments in working-class neighborhoods to palaces. Only those who returned got their property back, more or less. Approximately 1 billion euros belonging to Jews was held in an "absentee" account.
Two years ago the 70-year-old woman, who asked to remain anonymous referring to herself as Colette, contacted the Jewish Reparations Committee. Since the Committee was founded ten years ago, the French government has paid 400 million euros in reparations. Tens of thousands of requests for property restoration filed by Holocaust survivors and their descendants have been reviewed, and 75 new requests continue to arrive every month.
The Committee does not compensate for "moral damages." "How can you estimate the value of murder or humiliation, forbidding a person from working plying his trade or requiring him to wear a yellow Star of David?" asks committee chairman, Judge Gerard Gilano Larbitte.
The Committee only considers property claims: a ransacked store and the value of its contents, buildings, apartments, possessions, jewelry, artwork, cars. "You have to realize Jewish families were for the most part relatively poor," says a committee member. "Only a few can claim a work of art worth millions. So far one percent of the reparations has gone to artwork."
|
