Germany cut a reparations check to a Holocaust survivor. Then it demanded the money back The reparations checks Amira Gezow received every three months from the German government mattered to her. She had worked to get them and had helped other survivors secure theirs.
For Gezow, a German-born woman who lost both her parents in the Holocaust, the checks were, monetarily, a pittance: 72.55 euros per month, or about 240 dollars per disbursement. But they represented a measure of accountability, a tangible admission of fault, even if the totality of her loss could never be repaid. She received the checks from the late 1980s until she died in January at the age of 92.
A few months after her death, her daughter Ayelet Gezow received an unexpected letter from the German government. It contained a ruthless calculation: Amira Gezow had died two months into her most recent three- month disbursement period. Germany wanted the last 72-and-a-half euros back.
At first, Ayelet said, she was shocked at the audacity of the message. Then, she fired back: “After you killed my grandparents, you expect to receive this money out of my pocket?”
Gezow was navigating the somewhat arcane math and bureaucracy of Holocaust reparations. The logic of these payments can be infuriating or dumbfounding — for example, no payments are made to survivors because they lost family members, or even their entire family, during the Holocaust — and even with the payments some survivors have slipped into poverty. Reparations did not replace, or aim to replace, the generational wealth many European Jews had stolen by the Nazis. Yet their symbolic importance endures.
The youngest of four, Ayelet Gezow had not been receiving the checks and said she was barely aware of her mother’s finances during her lifetime. And as she pointed out, reparations hardly covered her mother’s cost of living or defrayed her medical bills late in life.
Yet the German consulate in New York was obstinate about getting the money back. When she called seeking an explanation for the letter, Gezow says she was brusquely rebuffed.
“She was yelling at me, saying I was stealing money from Germany,” she recalled of the conversation with a consulate employee. “You would think that with the history, there’d be some decorum, some sensitivity — something”.....
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Poster Comment:
I hope this tidbit brightens your day, however briefly. Cry us a river, rapacious ones! Or should I say שרייט אונדז אַ טייַך, גנבים קיקעס!