- More than 4,300 Holocaust survivors now in California
are among thousands from around the world eligible to receive $3,000 each.
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- By Henry Weinstein
LA Times Staff Writer
August 3, 2004
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- The Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany,
which specializes in Holocaust reparations issues, announced Monday that
it will distribute $401 million this week to 130,681 Nazi slave laborers
? including more than 4,300 in California ? from 62 countries around the
world.
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- The organization has distributed a total of $1.3 billion
to former slave and forced laborers, said Gideon Taylor, the executive
vice president of the conference in New York. The bulk of the money came
from a fund created in 2000 by the German government and financed by major
German corporations. About $200 million came from a settlement Jewish organizations
reached with Swiss banks in 1998.
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- Each survivor will receive about $3,000.
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- "There is no price that can be paid for the suffering
of Holocaust survivors," said Roman Kent, chairman of the American
Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
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- "Those who labored under the Nazis endured the worst
that humanity can devise and no amount of money can change that."
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- Nonetheless, he said, "The payments are a potent
symbol, one for which we fought very hard."
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- Nearly 62,000 recipients live in Israel.
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- More than 33,500 live in the U.S. Others come from Australia,
Canada, France, Germany and Hungary. Thirteen countries, including Albania,
the Bahamas, Ivory Coast and Tunisia, each had one recipient.
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- The range of countries "shows that this is an issue
for survivors all over the world," Taylor said. People who were forced
to work in a concentration camp, a labor camp or a ghetto "are having
their suffering recognized," he said.
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- Taylor said the conference had reviewed 150 Holocaust
archives in 30 countries to find names of eligible claimants. The research
led to payments for more than 30,000 survivors "who otherwise lacked
any documentation of their persecution," he said.
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- "Claims Conference researchers scoured paper and
microfilmed lists ? often handwritten and not alphabetized ? in order to
match the names of claimants to any documentation that would meet the requirements
established by the German Foundation," Taylor said. Lidia Budgor,
78, who lives near the Skirball Cultural Center in Brentwood, is among
the 4,326 in California found eligible. Budgor was 14 when her family was
moved into a ghetto in Lodz, Poland. While there, she distributed food
rations, she said.
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- Budgor said that in August 1944, when she was 18, her
family was sent to Auschwitz and within hours her father, mother, two younger
brothers and two younger sisters were exterminated in gas chambers.
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- Soon thereafter, Budgor was transported to Stuthoff,
a concentration camp in the eastern suburbs of Gdansk, Poland. While there,
she hauled bricks and cut bread.
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- Budgor said that on many days she opened the window in
the bread-cutting room and, outside the view of her Nazi supervisors, "dropped
crumbs" to a near-starving woman.
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- Later, she became emboldened and gave the woman pieces
of bread beyond her daily allotment.
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- Budgor said she and a group of other women were liberated
by the Russian army in March 1945, after barricading themselves in a pig
sty. "We were a horrible sight," she said.
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- Like many survivors, Budgor moved from one displaced
persons camp to another before coming to the United States in 1952. She
married and raised a family.
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- Now, Budgor said she spends a good deal of time helping
other survivors, including many who are poor and have acute healthcare
needs.
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- Asked about Monday's announcement, she said, "I
feel very good about it. We deserve it."
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- Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
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- http://www.latimes.com
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