Given the extraordinary quest he was about to begin, George Gregory felt strangely relaxed as he punched the keypad of his telephone early one morning last April.
After a few rings, a voice crackled on the other end of the line. Gregory, a retired Encino chief executive with an athlete's instincts and a businessman's cunning, had decided to be blunt.
"This may come as a shock to you, but I'm sending you a letter about what your company did under Nazi Germany 63 years ago," Gregory told the man who answered. Gregory explained that his father was a Jew who was forced to sell his factory for a fraction of its value. He wanted to talk.
On the phone, working late in his offices in a nearly deserted factory in western Germany, Hans Kollmeier sat stunned.
The president of a multinational chemicals corporation, Kollmeier was well aware that German companies had a dark history of profiting from Jews' losses in the Holocaust. But his firm had never been accused of such wrongs.
He wanted to learn more, he told his caller, but had a dinner appointment. He asked Gregory to call back the next day.
In the study of his modest ranch-style home, Gregory felt satisfied. At 82, he was starting one of the most difficult, most personal missions of his life, one that legal experts and Jewish activists describe as rarely successful.
With few exceptions, German companies have traditionally avoided acknowledging or accepting blame for their conduct in World War II. Even now, Jewish agencies are negotiating with a group of German firms to pay compensation to those forced to work as slaves during the war.
But Gregory was going to try to persuade a German company to voluntarily reimburse him for the business his family had lost three-score years earlier.
He would try to do it without a lawsuit, without the help of the formidable Jewish groups devoted to reparation issues, without favorable legal standing, even without concrete proof of what had actually happened so long ago.
Instead, Gregory would rely on what, in today's society, may seem the flimsiest of things.
In a world of lawsuits and legal contracts, he simply hoped that two men with a sense of honor and fair play could sit down, right a wrong and fashion some good from the horrors of a long-ago war.
Friends told him he had little chance of success. But Gregory was not a man to give up easily.
