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In January, 1995, on a typically dark and dismal winter day in Brussels, Stuart Eizenstat received a call from U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Richard Holbrooke that would change his life. Holbrooke asked him to be a special State Dept envoy. His mission: to assist in the return of property confiscated from religious communities by the Nazis and later nationalized by East European Communist governments.
Eizenstat, who was working at the U.S. Mission to the European Union, hesitated, knowing the assignment would be difficult. He had tasted a little of what was to come earlier in his career: During a stint in the Carter Administration, he had recommended that the U.S. establish the first Holocaust memorial outside of Israel, in Washington, D.C.
The bitter struggle that ensued between the Jewish community, which saw the Holocaust as a distinctly Jewish event, and others such as the Polish-American community, which pointed to their countrymen's own suffering under the Nazis, taught him a lasting lesson: "Nothing about the Holocaust is free of controversy," he writes. "It is politically radioactive. Everyone who it has touched, directly or indirectly, holds strong emotional opinions and seeks to claim it as theirs."
SURVIVOR PARADOX. Not even that lesson, though, could have adequately prepared Eizenstat for the controversies that surfaced in his new assignment. His work would lead to a reckoning of the economic and financial crimes of World War II, expose the myth of Switzerland's wartime neutrality, and foster an increase in anti-Semitism in Europe.
Eizenstat would also struggle with the paradox that I, along with others whose parents are Holocaust survivors, have found: The greater our distance from the Holocaust, the larger it looms. Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II (Public Affairs, $30.00, 401 pages) is Eizenstat's account of his journey to a strange corner of hell, one filled with dormant bank accounts, unclaimed property, gold, insurance policies, looted artwork and valuables -- and the restless ghosts of the dead.
The basic facts of the Holocaust are now horribly familiar: the 15 million civilians killed, including 6 million Jews. The world's silent acquiescence to the Nazi program of extermination. The 10 million people forced into labor by the Germans. The theft of some 600,000 works of art. The homes, businesses, and money confiscated. The survivors, filled with sorrow and anger, dread and guilt at being left among the undead.
"SEETHING BITTERNESS." Eizenstat's descent into the horror begins in Eastern Europe -- Ground Zero of the Holocaust. In visits from 1995 to 2000 to a dozen East European countries, he encountered a host of problems: competing wartime claims, the feeble rule of law and weak judicial systems, the legacy of an age-old anti-Semitism, government complicity, and officials' refusal to return such properties as schools and community centers. He also finds "a seething bitterness that the citizens of these countries, also Hitler's victims, had never received compensation from Germans" comparable to what was paid to Jewish survivors.
Had he kept to the original parameters of his mission, the modest results Eizenstat achieved might have ended as a footnote to post-cold war U.S. policy. But in the late '90s, news articles concerning "dormant" bank accounts in Switzerland began to surface, raising questions about the role of Swiss banks during and after World War II.
Eizenstat read of the roadblocks placed before one survivor, Greta Beer, in her quest to recover a secret account set up in a Zurich bank on the eve of the war by her father. Right away, he "saw the connection to the property restitution work." Eizenstat asked that his responsibilities be extended to exploring the issue of Holocaust-related bank accounts in Switzerland and seeing that the sums reached their rightful heirs.
Copyright 2003, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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