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August 6, 2004/Av 19 5763, Vol. 55, No. 46
Payments issued for slave labor
URIEL HEILMAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - Gisela Schlanger had tears running down her face as she described her plans for the payment she was to receive this week from Germany for her Holocaust-era slave labor.
"My aim after the Holocaust was to raise my children frum-Yiddish," she said, explaining that she strived to bring up a religious family committed to Jewish tradition.
"My children are talmidei chachamim" - Torah schol-ars, she said. "I have a very special grandson, a tzadik. The money I get I give him to buy sforim," or books of Judaica.
Each book will carry a memorial inscription for family members murdered by the Nazis, Schlanger said.
Schlanger spoke Aug. 2 at a Claims Conference news conference in New York called to announce new payments to Jewish slave laborers.
A survivor from Slovakia, Schlanger was one of 130,681 survivors from 62 countries who were sent payments of about $3,000 this week by the Claims Conference. The payout, totaling some $401 million, represented the second and final installment of payments from a $1.1 billion slave labor agreement with Germany.
It was the largest-ever single Holocaust payout in history, according to officials at the Claims Conference, which administers the Jewish portion of compensation payments from Germany to Nazi-era slave laborers.
The money comes from a $5 billion fund paid for by the German government and 6,000 German businesses, only some of which benefited from Jewish slave labor. Most recipients are non-Jews.
"The payment carries a value that cannot be measured in dollars," said Aron Krell, 76, a Polish-born survivor.
"This money can never compensate me for the loss of my family, my childhood or even for all the work that I performed. No amount ever could," he said. "But I do feel some satisfaction from receiving payment, however symbolic, as a recognition by the German government and companies of the terrible wrongs they inflicted on us. We have waited a very long time for this acknowledgment, this apology."
As a volunteer for the Claims Conference, Krell has worked the phones helping Polish- and Yiddish-speaking survivors understand what they need to do to get their claims processed and assuaging their anxieties about when they will get paid.
Combined with the first payment, which was paid to claimants as soon as their claim of having been a forced laborer was verified and processed, ex-slave laborers received a total of about $7,500.
The Claims Conference's Aug. 2 news conference brought to a close one of the conference's central tasks: finding survivors and verifying their accounts of forced labor by the Nazis.
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