survivors

Boca Raton, Fla. — These aging Holocaust survivors were teed off.

Last Sunday, on a cool Florida morning, an estimated 75 survivors and their supporters gathered on a street corner here just outside the gates of Old Course at the Broken Sound Country Club. Inside, professional golfers on the senior tour were competing in the fifth annual Allianz Championship.

As the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany seeks to root out additional cases of fraud, the $42.5 million scandal that has rocked the organization has rekindled dissatisfaction with the group’s annual allocation of tens of millions of dollars.

To address those growing complaints, Julius Berman, the Claims Conference chairman, told The Jewish Week he plans to announce “in a couple of days” appointments to a long-delayed special committee that is to review past and future disbursements.

The recent revelation that U.S. government officials gave aid and comfort to some Nazi war criminals and collaborators for several decades is as shocking as Claude Rains' discovery in Casablanca that gambling was going on in Rick’s Café. It has long been known, for example, that SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Klaus Barbie, who headed the Gestapo in Lyon, France, from 1942 until 1944 and who ordered the deportation of Jewish orphans to Auschwitz, subsequently became an agent of the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps.

It has been 67 years since another inmate, Stefan Heyman, saved Ernest Michel from what he considered certain death in Auschwitz.

As Michel recalls it, Heyman chose the young man to record in the Nazi’s logbook the names of all Jewish inmates who were murdered each day in the gas chambers there.

Michel, now 87, had studied calligraphy before the war, and the recording job ensured that he had extra food and would be protected.

“You won’t be sent up the chimney,” Michel said Heyman, who was not Jewish, told him.