Survivors to Collect on Debt Long Overdue
MOSCOW — The hand of fate that twice reached out to shield Yevgenia Grinberg from Nazi firing squads may once again be visible in the twilight of a life that has been lapped by waves of cruelty and kindness.
Alone in a one-room apartment and living on $60 a month, the 64-year-old retired scientist has just been promised compensation for her World War II suffering by the German government, which will pay her and other Holocaust survivors $140 a month.
Bonn's decision to extend pensions to the East European victims of Nazi crimes more than half a century after they were committed might be seen by more embittered survivors as woefully too little and way too late.
But for Grinberg and at least 1,000 other Russian citizens who emerged from the ghettos and death camps alive, only to face deprivation and discrimination in the Soviet Union, the pensions due to begin this summer could make the difference between bare existence and living.
"Time is of the essence, as every day we draw a little closer to death," Grinberg observes with resigned serenity, saying she hopes the promised assistance will allow her to buy the medicine she needs to soothe her ulcers, kidney ailments and lifelong nervous condition.
Few among the likely recipients make light of the material value of the impending reparations, because 250 German marks--about $140--remains a princely sum for most in Russia.
Money Refocuses Attention on Victims
But the belated compensation has also refocused attention on the plight of Nazi victims from the former Soviet Union for whom betrayal, fear and mistreatment continued for decades after their liberation. Anti-Semitism has long been prevalent in this native land of the pogrom, and paranoid Soviet leaders often suspected anyone who survived Nazi detention of having collaborated with the enemy.
"We have been victims of every political change this century," says Semyon Zeltser, a 66-year-old retired economist who spent three harrowing years as a youth in the Odessa ghetto and a professional life hobbled by anti-Semitic discrimination. Now scraping by on a pension of $65 a month, he too expects to qualify for the German compensation once documentation of eligibility is completed this summer.
