In the Holocaust (Shoah),1 the Jewish people lost not only their lives but also memories of the deceased and of the survivors, whose return and retrieval depended on others. These lost memories lay scattered all over Europe in assets they were forced to leave behind. To this very day, most of them have never been restituted. These stolen assets include land and buildings, household items, businesses, insurance policies, bank accounts, art, musical instruments, as well as communal property such as synagogues and cemeteries. Their owners and their descendants hail from Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria, and I share stories of their losses. I begin with one of my own.
My grandfather, Aron (Aharon) Malowany after whom I am named, owned a small farm in the little town of Goworowo, northwest of Warsaw. Besides the family’s home, the farm included a windmill with which they ground buckwheat or kasha, livestock, poultry, an orchard, and a home for the housekeeper. In their place are now two large villas, and a veterinarian surgeon’s office. An unknown person is now cultivating and earning profits from my grandfather’s land.
In the Holocaust, my father, Dawid (David) Malowany (1907–1997), lost his entire family, who had been residents of the town: his grandfather, his parents, his brother and two sisters and their families, and his first wife along with their three young sons. Of his entire family in Poland, he was the only survivor. When he returned to Poland in 1945, he went to Goworowo in hopes of retrieving the silverware that his parents had hidden on the family’s property. He couldn’t do so. “I understood that if I didn’t leave at once, I would be murdered,” he told me.
Estate of Aron Malowany (author’s paternal grandfather) on Szkolna 1 St, Goworowo, Poland (ChatGPT). Based upon research conducted by Jerzy Cichowski (Goworowo: Poland, 2000). On file with author
For many Jewish people, the property they lost included insurance benefits. Take the case of Rudy Rosenberg, a New Yorker from Belgium who testified at a meeting of state insurance commissioners in September 1997 at the age of sixty-seven. In 1942, he and his family—his father Hillel, his mother Frieda, and his sister, lived in Brussels, Belgium. He came to America in 1949 and served three years in the US Army during the Korean War. He relates what was presumably a common story among families like his:
The Swiss insurance company Winterthur sold insurance policies to Jews in Belgium, knowing full well that we were going to be exterminated. I remember that one day in March or April 1942, two men came to the house to sell us life insurance. They said they were from Winterthur … [and that the company] was offering Jews a special deal. You only had to pay half the premium on signing and the balance on the anniversary of the policy a year later. They must have known at the time that nobody would be around a year later to pay the second half, and the policy would be cancelled … Winterthur never tried to locate me or my sister or my mother before my father died.2
Much the same happened to Marta Cornell’s family. She was born in 1927 in a small town in Czechoslovakia, and later lived in New York City. At the time of the war, her father, Leopold Drucker, was a well-to-do physician. Marta, an elder sister, and her mother and father, shared the house with her maternal grandmother. Marta recounts:
My father started buying insurance policies when my older sister was born in 1924, and kept it up until March 1939, when the Nazis occupied our country … The only family members who survived the Nazis were my 80-year-old grandmother and me … I found a piece of paper with my father’s handwriting … It was the details of insurance policies—the date of purchase, the policy number and how much each policy were worth … the policies had been purchased from Generali and RAS … Generali and RAS refused to pay or even explain why … Shortly after I came to New York I again tried to get my inheritance money from Generali and RAS. Both companies turned me down.3
Perhaps this next story from The Netherlands of stolen household goods will be more familiar to US readers. The rooms in what was once Anne Frank’s home in Amsterdam are now bare. No sooner had the Franks been arrested and sent to Bergen-Belsen camp than their Dutch neighbors entered and stripped the house of its contents. Otto Frank returned to this house in 1963 and began preparing it for use as a museum. He was asked whether he wanted its furniture reconstructed. “No,” said Frank, “leave the building as it is.”4 As in hundreds of other instances, the looted property remained in the hands of its Dutch plunderers.
Wilma Stein, former Chair of the Jewish Welfare Organization in Amsterdam, likewise relates:
My mother had a big piano, which, after the war, she saw in the possession of people she never knew. My mother was able to prove that the piano belonged to her, because it was recorded as part of her possessions when she married. The new owners, however, were able to prove that they [had] purchased it from some other party during the war, and my mother could not get it back.
The Dutch also plundered business premises. The parents of Aryeh Cohen, manager of the YULIS senior citizens home in Haifa, had a chain of four women’s clothing stores in Groningen, near the North Sea coast. When his parents returned from Bergen Belsen, they found strangers in their shops and their apartment … the shops belonged to the Cohens, who were unable to regain possession of them.5
In 1999, Maria Altmann sued the Austrian government for the return of her family’s paintings, among them the celebrated “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” by Gustav Klimt, which had resurfaced in a Vienna Museum. The Austrian government fought any suggestion of restitution, claiming the Klimt paintings as national patrimony. She eventually won the case in 2006 and sold the painting for $135 million. Her struggle for restitution was highlighted in the 2015 film “Woman in Gold” and in a book.6 Less well known is that in addition to losing their art, the family also lost its business, ÖZAG, one of Austria’s largest sugar refineries, because of machinations between the Nazis and Swiss bankers. Despite the family’s extensive efforts to protect these assets, the Swiss bank “actively cooperated with the forced sale” of the ÖZAG shares, transferring the bank-held shares to a “designated Nazi ‘purchaser’ at a small fraction of the shares’ value.” This was in violation of the bank’s contractual agreement with, and fiduciary duty to, the family. The value of these Swiss assets was returned to the family through the claims process of the Swiss Banks Accounts Settlement.7
A different concern is communal property, like synagogues and their contents. One of many examples is that of the Kielce synagogue in Poland. The town is infamous as the site of the last pogrom in Poland, a massacre of forty-two Jews by a mob which attacked the Jewish community house more than a year after the war was over, on July 4, 1946.8
The synagogue was built between 1901 and 1903 on grounds donated by Mojżesz Pfefer. Nazis desecrated the temple during WWII, and turned it into a prison and storage facility for stolen Jewish property.9 Włodzimierz Katz, head of the Jewish community in Kielce, testified that the synagogue was not restituted because it was established as a separate institution and not as a property that inherently belonged to the Jewish community, and that the Polish law on restitution of communal property permits only restitution of property that legally belonged to the Jewish community.10
Theft of such communal Jewish property extends far beyond buildings to Torah scrolls, menorah, and so forth. The Jerusalem Post reported:
A Hungarian rabbi had uncovered 103 Torah scrolls stolen from Hungarian Jews during WWII and stashed in a Russian library. Slomo Koves, chief rabbi of the Unified Hungarian Jewish Congregation, said he had found the scrolls while following up a previous recovery of Hungarian war loot in the Lenin Scientific Library in Nizhny Novgorod, 400 km (240 miles) east of Moscow …
“For seven decades they have been laying naked in those archives, while their only value is for a Jewish community to see them and use them every day,” he said.11
Likewise valuable chiefly to the Jewish community are Jewish cemeteries. Her son-in-law, Roberto Loiederman, tells of Genia visiting a cemetery in Poland:
In a sense, that’s what Genia became after leaving Poland …: A Keeper of Memory. She kept her memories alive … She remembers with nostalgia her life in a small town in Galicia (southeastern Poland) … all memories bathed in warmth. On the outskirts of Tarnow, a handsome city filled with old buildings and winding pedestrian streets, we see a brick wall that encloses a large space … gravestones with Hebrew writing and Stars of David … But there’s something else. This plot is virtually the only legacy of a community that once lived here … Full lives … And, in the end, they left almost nothing except these stone markers.12
Moshe Sanbar (Sandberg) (1926–2012) was born in Hungary, lost his parents in the Shoah, and survived the Dachau concentration camp.13 He was twenty-two when he arrived in Israel in 1948 in the midst of its War of Independence, and was immediately drafted into the Israeli army. He was severely wounded, almost losing a leg, at the bloody battle of Latrun, a former British fortification held by the Jordanian Legion and blocking the passage to Jerusalem.
Sanbar served as head of the powerful budget department at the Ministry of Finance, was governor of Bank of Israel, the central bank, at the age of forty-five—the youngest governor worldwide at his time, and chairman of Bank Leumi, then the largest Israeli bank. During his term at Bank Leumi, he was a founding member and chairman of the umbrella Center of Organizations for Holocaust Survivors in Israel (COHSI) (see chapter 1). Sanbar was made deputy chairman of the Claims Conference, and was appointed as its international treasurer when COHSI became part of the Claims Conference (see chapters 1 and 2). In turn, COHSI was a founding member of the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO), and Sanbar became a member of its Executive Board. Later he was elected as Chairman of the Executive Board of the Claims Conference. As a representative of the Claims Conference, Sanbar was a member of the Swiss National Committee on Needy Holocaust [Shoah] Survivors and was appointed to the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims led by former US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.
Sanbar tried and failed to retrieve financial assets of the company in Hungary that belonged to his father and uncle, one that exported food to west and east European countries. Finally, as a prominent economist and public figure in Israel, Sanbar fought from 1989 until his death in 2012 for the rights of Shoah survivors, and in particular for the restitution of Jewish property looted during WWII.
Not all families have a Roberto or a Genia to visit family properties or graves, to look for buried family silver or stolen art and furniture, or to try to have insurance policies paid out. Vast amounts of Jewish assets of all types were left heirless. That suited certain countries just fine. But others have long shown interest in returning assets to descendants of those now dead, or to the Jewish community in general. The US Senate, for example, has been explicit that it wants such assets to aid Holocaust survivors, perpetuate remembrance of the Holocaust, and be used for other similar needs.14 Senator Tammy Baldwin spoke the truth when she noted: “These individuals have waited far too long to recover, or receive compensation for, what is rightfully theirs.”15
David Malowany, Rudy Rosenberg, Marta Cornell, Otto Frank, Wilma Stein, Maria Altmann, Wlodzimierz Katz, Slomo Koves, Genia, and Roberto Loiederman, Moshe Sanbar: all of these Jews, their parents, and millions of others survived the inferno but had to leave behind their lawful assets. Their fates reveal a common pattern: all fought to regain their assets. Most of them were prevented from doing so. Along with their assets, they lost the memories attached to those assets, be they wedding rings, Torah scrolls, money, or land, and the lives those assets could have made possible. This book tells the story of how and why that happened, and what we can learn from it for the future.
Shoah means Holocaust in Hebrew. I use the term “Shoah restitution” throughout the book to denote: Holocaust-Era restitution, Holocaust restitution campaign, Holocaust restitution movement, looted assets restitution, restitution and restoration of Jewish assets, Jewish restitution, seized assets restitution, nationalized Jewish property, etc. In addition to simplifying matters the reason for adopting this term is to distinguish between the Jewish Holocaust and all other acts of genocide that have been termed “Holocaust.” The 2009 Prague International Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets (see chapter 4) used the term Shoah instead of Holocaust when establishing the European Shoah Legacy Institute (ESLI). In this book I use the terms Holocaust and Shoah interchangeably.
Charles Weiss, Closing the Books: Jewish Insurance Claims from the Holocaust (New York: Enigma Books, 2008), 55–56.
Weiss, Closing the Books, 58–60.
Anne Frank, “How it all began: From hiding pace to museum” available at How it all began | Anne Frank House.
Itamar Levin, “7.5 Guilders per Jew” (Tel Aviv: Globes, 5 May, 1997) available at 7.5 Guilders Per Jew—Globes.
Anne-Marie O’Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (New York: Vintage Books, 2015).
Judah Gribetz, Shari C. Reig, Special Masters’ Final Report on the Swiss Banks’ Holocaust Settlement Distribution Process, Executive Summary (2019), 5–6 available at swissbankclaims.com/New docs/Executive Summary.pdf. (See also chapter 6).
See JTA, “Shabbat welcomed in Kielce synagogue, again,” available at Shabbat welcomed in Kielce synagogue, again (thecjn.ca).
See “Kielce,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, available at https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Kielce.
Interviewed by author, February 29, 2020.
“Hungarian rabbi finds 103 stolen Torah scrolls, probably taken during Holocaust,” Reuters, February 18, 2014, available at Hungarian rabbi finds 103 stolen Torah scrolls, probably taken during Holocaust—The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com).
See Roberto Loiederman, “Keeper of Memory” available at https://cargoliterary.com/article/keeper-of-memory/ (no longer available).
Rachel Michaeli, Moshe Sanbar: An Economist in the Political Arena (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Miskal-Yedioth Ahronoth Books and Chemed Books, 2010); Moshe Sanbar available at Moshe Sanbar—Wikipedia.—Search (bing.com).
Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today (JUST) Act Report (Washington: US State Department, 2020) available at (S_585927) Tab 1. JUST Act Report.2.25-REVISED-FINALACTION (state.gov).
Tammy Baldwin, “US Senator Tammy Baldwin and Senator Marco Rubio Applaud Congressional Passage of JUST Act” (Washington: US Senate, 2018) available at U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin and Senator Marco Rubio Applaud Congressional Passage of JUST Act | U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin (senate.gov).