Germany to compensate Holocaust survivors who fled Nazis as kids, 80 years later
Eighty years later, Germany has said that it will compensate Jewish men and women who survived the Holocaust as children—most of whom lost their parents during the Shoah and years of World War II—according to the Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which negotiates restitution with the German government.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the Hall of Names during her visit at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem on October 4, 2018. Credit: Oren Ben Hakoon/POOL.
The country will pay $2,800 each to survivors from among the 10,000 who fled the “Kindertransport,” which sent children from Germany to Great Britain as part of the latter agreeing to admit an unspecified number of Jewish children as refugees, following the November 1938 German pogrom of Kristallnacht, or “Night of the Broken Glass.”
With about 1,000 survivors remaining—approximately half of whom are living in Britain—the reimbursement is touted as a “symbolic recognition of their suffering,” according to Claims Conference negotiator Greg Schneider.
“In almost all the cases, the parents who remained were killed in concentration camps in the Holocaust, and [their children] have [had] tremendous psychological issues,” he told The Associated Press.
As many as 1.5 million children perished in the Holocaust.
JNS
