You would think that by now just about everyone who personally survived the Holocaust was somehow being taken care of. So much in reparations have been paid by the German government or insurance companies. It would be hard to imagine that someone who personally survived the Holocaust and permanently lost the ability to function in human society or take care of herself would be excluded from all sources of assistance. And yet, that is exactly the situation of certain classes of Holocaust survivors today.
For example, let’s say you were a young child of eleven in 1943, and let’s say that you managed to evade deportation and to spend the years between 1943 and 1946 wandering alone in the Nazi world. Now, how many eleven-year-olds do you know who could handle that sort of thing? But no matter what might have happened to that eleven-year-old girl – starvation, violence, rape, you name it – she would be excluded from receiving any assistance since she never entered a concentration camp.
Now a lot of people suffer in a war. Military conflicts always lead to casualties, and compensation is not always demanded. When damages are caused in the natural course of a justified military action, no compensation needs to be offered.
But that has nothing to do with the suffering of Catherine Frankel, the girl I am talking about, since she was not forced to wander the streets at age eleven by any military action, but rather as a result of the attempt to send her to a concentration camp for extermination on the grounds that she was Jewish. This was not a military action, it was an act of extermination aimed at the most unmilitary target of all: an eleven-year-old girl.
Now if our eleven-year-old girl had managed to survive her ordeal and go on to lead a productive life, to earn a living, raise a family, and support herself in some way or other, we might overlook the moral obligations of the German government. But what if the ordeal caused her to permanently lose all ability to support herself? Surely in such a case the German government would step in and provide something. Wouldn’t they?
Well, not necessarily. In fact not at all. Catherine Frankel receives nothing at all from the German government, and relies on the full-time care of her younger sister, herself a Holocaust survivor, and on her sister’s ability to stretch her own small pension for the needs of two.
It is not as though the German government is out of funds. Like other European nations, Germany has been very generous to the Palestinians. German sympathy for the Palestinians is certainly commendable, but why not show the same sympathy to Catherine? After all, the Germans caused her suffering in the first place.
Unlike German contributions to the Palestinians, German reparations to Holocaust victims have been paid in many cases only as a result of long legal battles. But in cases like Catherine’s, which is not a typical story, no class action suit has been launched, and so Catherine is disregarded.
Not so the Palestinians. These are people that Germany likes to support, even if she owes them nothing. There is something particularly troubling about Germany’s generosity to the Palestinians. Of all the people in the world, the Palestinians are the ones who have dedicated themselves to perpetuating the Holocaust. Palestinian terrorists continue to target Jews around the world and especially in Israel. German funds may not be used directly for Palestinian terrorists, but it is not hard to see that if humanitarian needs are taken care of by others, Palestinians can use more of their own money to kill Jews. And that is exactly what they do.
Palestinian terror does not distinguish between Holocaust survivors and anyone else. It is aimed at all Jews, just as German genocide was. Many of the victims of Palestinian terror were themselves Holocaust survivors or the children of Holocaust survivors. It is paradoxical that German money that is not being used to take care of victims like Catherine is being used to hunt her down.
Experience has shown that while money flows freely to terrorists, it only reaches the victims when pressure is applied. Surely pressure must be exerted on the Germans to stop the flow of money to the terrorists, and to provide some minimal amount of assistance to the victims of her own genocidal policies. As in the past, so too today, we cannot rely on the German conscience to do what is right.
(Holocaust survivors who were hidden and/or street children are forming a new lobby to fight for recognition and restitution. Contact Bracha Frankel for further information. Tel: 02-994319 or 056-446103; e-mail: [email protected])
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