April 29, 2005/Nisan 20 5765, Volume 57, No. 35
$21.8 million award in Swiss bank case
TOM TUGEND
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 Maria Altmann and her extended family received a multimillion-dollar award for losses suffered during the Holocaust. Photo by Tom Tugend/JTA |
Maria Altmann, 89, and her extended family have recently been awarded $21.8 million for losses suffered during the Holocaust.
The money came from a $1.25 billion fund established by Swiss banks in 1998 to settle a vast class-action suit.
Altmann's story started in Vienna, where she was born in 1916 - the pampered daughter of the fabulously wealthy Bloch-Bauer family. The extended clan owned Austria's largest sugar-refining factory, numerous mansions and a stunning art collection.
The Bloch-Bauers were Jewish, but in the pick-and-choose style of central Europe's Jewish upper class.
"We went to a temple once a year on Yom Kippur, where I remember seeing the Rothschilds, the men in top hats and cutaway coats," recalls Altmann. "But otherwise, we celebrated Christmas and Easter."
In December 1937, during the last grand Jewish wedding in Vienna, Maria Bloch-Bauer married Fritz Altmann, an aspiring opera singer, and the newlyweds left for an extended honeymoon.
Shortly after their return, Hitler's troops marched into Vienna.
A week before the Nazi annexation, the Bloch-Bauer men - along with their business partner, Otto Pick - foresaw what was coming.
To shield their property, they traveled to a Swiss bank, set up a trust account and deposited a block of stock, with the provision that it could be sold only with the unanimous consent of the family shareholders.
The bank reneged on the deal and sold the stock in the sugar factory to a German businessman with Nazi connections, at a fraction of its value.
JTA has learned that the bank was the Union Bank of Switzerland, headquartered in Zurich.
In 1998, it merged with another Swiss bank to form UBS, now the world's largest financial-services and wealth-management firm, with branches in 50 countries.
Altmann, whose share of the settlement is $2 million, is the mother of four, grandmother of six and an "expectant" great-grandmother. Until two years ago she ran a fashionable dress shop for ladies ages 40 and older.
She plans no changes in her lifestyle, and said she's planning to make donations to some Jewish causes, although she has no connections to Los Angeles' Jewish community.