The Belgian government and banks have agreed to pay € 110 million (US$ 170 million) to Holocaust survivors, families of victims and the Jewish community for material losses during Word War II, when Belgium was occupied by Nazi Germany. Campaigners welcomed the decision to compensate those whose property and goods in Belgium had been looted by the occupiers. Belgium is facing 5,210 outstanding claims for restitution stemming from the Holocaust. Of those, 162 are for over € 20,000 (US$ 30,000). Overall, € 35.2 million (US$ 54 million) is to be paid to individual claimants with the rest going to a Jewish trust which will help the poor and keep the memory of the horrors of the Holocaust alive. Of the total payout, € 45.5 million (US$ 70 million) will come from the Belgian authorities and € 55 million (US$ 85 million) from banks. Most of the remainder will come from insurance companies.
The deal is the latest successful effort by Holocaust victims to win restitution payments. The German government has paid more than US$ 6 billion to Jewish victims or their families since the first deal was negotiated by the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in the 1950s. In the 1990s, Swiss banks agreed to pay US$ 1.25 billion for dormant accounts left by Holocaust victims, following pressure from the WJC. A decade-long legal battle in the US against European insurance companies, which were accused of refusing to pay out policies to victims or their beneficiaries, was settled earlier this year for US$ 175 million.
The Belgian agreement came after a decade of increasing introspection across society and studious investigations of the often sketchy evidence which was left from those chaotic years. Some 50,000 Jews lived in Belgium in the 1930s and about half of them were killed in the Holocaust. Last year, prime minister Guy Verhofstadt apologized for Belgian authorities' involvement in the deportation of Jews to Nazi extermination camps. David Susskind, a Holocaust survivor and long-time leader of Belgium’s Jewish community, told the AP news agency, “The point is to rebuild a Jewish community like we had before the war. For suffering, there is no price."
