Testimony of Alex Moskovic

House of Representatives

Committee on Foreign Affairs

Subcommittee on Europe

October 3, 2007

Good Afternoon. My name is Alex Moskovic. At the age of 14, I was the only one of 41 family members to survive the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald extermination and concentration camps. I came to this country in 1947 and after my retirement, I moved to Florida and volunteered to work on the Advisory Committee of the Ruth Rales Jewish Family Services in Boca Raton FL. The growing problems facing survivors as they age, the lack of resources to assist them, and the overall frustration faced by all survivors, including me, who attempted to recover their family assets such as insurance policies, led me to become active with local survivor groups and the national Holocaust Survivors Foundation USA.

I am here to speak, as a Holocaust survivor, about the failure of what is often called the quest for “a measure of justice” for survivors. All agree that no amount of money can ever compensate us for the crimes of the Holocaust. But the processes employed over the last decade have mostly failed. We have been denied access to the truth about our families and their lives. In allowing unauthorized negotiators to enter compromises over Swiss bank thefts, insurance thefts, and property restitution, the notion that “perfect justice is impossible” has served as a cover for secrecy, and for allowing governments and global financial institutions to benefit from the theft of tens of billions of dollars in the Holocaust. We are asking Congress to help. You are our last chance for a dignified outcome that respects survivors’ rights and interests.

I only have time for a few specific remarks here, but I ask that you read my entire submission and the attachments which I request be included in the official record. Some of these materials are older as you can see, and were based on the best data available. More recent data, which I have also included, show that over 80,000 Holocaust survivors in the United States either live below the poverty level, or have incomes so low that they are considered poor. Tens of thousands cannot afford a decent quality of life. All of our volunteer activities cannot provide the medicines, home care, dentistry, rent, food, and other basic needs of these survivors. You must ask all participants in the hearing about these problems. You are our last hope.

My father had a business in our hometown of Sobrance, Czechoslovakia. This was an area where Generali, a Jewish company at the time, was a major force in the insurance market. The International Commission for Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, the ICHEIC, was formed in 1998. I applied and gave all the information I had, which wasn’t much for a boy who survived at age 14 with no living relatives. Several months later, my name and the names of several family members appeared on the ICHEIC website, indicating that policies had been sold to us before WWII. Yet I never received any specific response from ICHEIC. ICHEIC denied my claims without providing any information whatsoever. I had no choice but to accept their decision. The fact that 97% of the Jewish families’ insurance money wasn’t repaid does not surprise me because most survivors who entered ICHEIC believe it was a fiasco. We need Congress to pass HR 1746 to correct this injustice.

Survivors are angry and hurt that so many billions remain held by the corporate plunderers of the Holocaust. Not only is this concealment wrong morally, it is unacceptable when you consider the amount of poverty and need among survivors today. This might surprise you if you read statements by Claims Conference President Israel Singer, that $20 billion was recovered for Holocaust survivors in the last decade. If this is true, we are all wondering what happened to that money. I will give you one example because of time, but it is similar to thousands of similar cases all over the U.S. and the world.

Mr.and Mrs. L.( 86 and 79 years old ), Survivors of Poland, now live in a small condo at Century Village in Boca Raton FL. Mr. L. is a stroke victim now suffering from dementia and cannot be left alone. Mrs. L. was Mr. L.s caretaker, however a while ago Mrs. L. had an emergency and was hospitalized and received coronary by-pass surgery, valve replacement and repair of a hole in the heart. Her recovery had complications and she needed to be in extensive re-hab. Though a relative helped with Mr. L at first, she could not afford to miss more work. The Social Services provided some stop-gap assistance, but due to their experiences as survivors, and the problems of age, the separation was traumatic for both Mr. L and Mrs. L and it was clear they needed to be together. But the JFS lacked the funds to allow Mr. L. to join his wife in the re-hab center. Survivors can only receive approximately 8 hours from the Claims Conference and the community for home care or situations such as this.

I see these kinds of tragic problems all the time. It is happening more often as the survivor population is aging and it becomes almost impossible for them to take care of one another. On the Advisory Committee, we are forced to turn down requests for medications and devices such as dentures all the time because there is not enough funds. Today, Mr. and Mrs. L, and many thousands of survivors, are simply not be able to receive assistance they require for a decent level of health care and human dignity.

At the Ruth Rales JFS, the clients in the past few years have doubled because of aging and but the allocation of funds have remained the same. How can we live with such a deplorable situation?

So we don’t know where the $20 billion has gone, but we know not enough is being used to care for survivors in need. The major source of money for these programs is the funds recovered from German properties, claimed and managed by the Claims Conference. But the Conference has never published an accounting of what it did with all these properties, so no one really knows how much it has available to spend. Ernst and Young recently wrote that the group’s disclosures were not proper. We are all waiting for the full story.

In addition, the Conference spends 20% of its annual discretionary budget for projects unrelated to survivors needs, like education and research. Over half of these grants go to board members or the Claims Conference, or their affiliates, raising moral if not legal questions. We survivors believe that money recovered that belonged to our families should either go to the actual heirs, or to benefit living survivors who are in need today.

We are the ones who lost everything, our beloved parents, brothers, and sisters, as well as everything we owned. Why should others decide what happens to our families property like ICHEIC did? Who is the Claims Conference or anyone else to tell us that the memories of our murdered loved ones should be honored with various programs while living survivors are suffering and money is being hoarded and hidden? Survivors do not understand why public officials and other organizations that have supported the status quo do not give us the respect of allowing us to make these decisions for ourselves, and why they tolerate this kind of injustice.

I would like to add that there is no reason the German Government itself should be on the sidelines in this discussion. Germany remains responsible for the catastrophe that befell us, and should not be allowed to sit by as an observer while any Holocaust survivor today lacks the care, food, and shelter they need. Shouldn’t survivors receive at least as much as retired SS officers?

The years left are but few to be required to be concerned with the survivors needs in the world. Time is running out, the hour glass is emptying, and if not Here, Where? And if not Now… When?

Thank You.