Holocaust

The Holocaust and Truth Telling

The campaign for restitution was and continues to be primarily about truth telling and the correcting of history. Through the negotiations for material restitution, nations and industries were forced to face the truth and reality of what they had done during the Holocaust.

The most important achievement of the past decade, besides gaining new information through recently opened archival dossiers (and making millions of them available to historians), was the feeling that, for the first time, the record was set straight and people could no longer hide behind their own myths. Not all Jews were poor, not all banks were honest, not all insurance companies discharged their duties to those who paid them premiums. Even the Allies - though not as bad as neutral countries and certainly unlike the enemies of the Jews - enriched themselves by inaction and sometimes corrupt policies.

"Truth telling" is what the fifteen commissions that were established throughout Europe, North America, and South America accomplished. After 55 years, President Johannes Rau of Ger-many finally wrote letters of forgiveness to every Holocaust survivor that benefited from the Slave Labor agreement. Chancellor Franz Vranitzky spoke in the Knesset putting to rest once and for all the canard that Austria was the first victim of Nazism rather than its first willing accomplice. Swiss president Armand Koller apologized for his country's neutrality when such a position was deemed immoral. And French president Jacques Chirac realized that not all of France was in the resistance with Charles de Gaulle. A large part of it, including his predecessor, was for much of the war allied with Henri-Philippe Petain. The rest of institutional France was in collaboration with the Nazis until 1943, although they didn't admit it until 1995. These were the achievements of the struggle for moral and material restitution in the period of the 1990s.

Holland did not valiantly save all of its Jews but willingly deported 90 percent of them. Norway participated in the deportations and illegal appropriations of Jewish property. And a lot of countries did not just act as willing partners - Hungary , Croatia , Slovakia , Latvia , and Lithuania participated not only in deportations and mass murders but also in the grossest theft that went along with the ugliest murder in the history of genocide. In fact, the organized theft of Jewish property was an intentional and major byproduct of murder during the war. There were no "good guys" but for a few exceptions in Bulgaria and Denmark where Jews were saved in an organized effort.

Money was an important material expression of remorse and restitution. The struggle for justice, however, was not about money, and those who chose to make it so, whether they were Jews or non-Jews, tried one more time to revise history and failed.

Justice has many faces and it as indivisible as truth. The only way to struggle against injustice and anti-Semitism is to expose the truth. This has been the greatest struggle.