On Wed, 7 Mar 2001, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> I sent some of the comments from this list under this heading to Norman
> Finkelstein, and he replied as follows:
C.G., if you are in touch with Norman, could you ask him about point two? There are a couple of claims in his book I can't account for at all, and this is one of them:
> (2) The Jewish organizations have made claims on compensation
> based on wildly inflated figures for ex-concentration camp inmates still
> alive. Indeed, these figures verge on Holocaust denial;
Norman is very fond of this claim. He made it in his interview with Alexander Cockburn, he made it in his interview with Doug, he makes it in his book, and he has made it many times since. But I am at a loss to understand what he is talking about. The original claimants in the Swiss affair were the *heirs* of people *who left money in the bank.* This group had no necessary overlap with camp victims. If every Jew who died in the camps had an account, you could still have a legitimate live claimant for every one of those accounts today. In fact you could have 10. And this leaves out the dormant accounts for refugees who escaped the clutches of the camps. There are lots of dormant accounts in the world for people who never went through bad times at all. And better off Jews, of the sort that would have had Swiss bank accounts, had a better chance of getting out. But all they would have had to have done is suffer the loss of their account ID number and they'd be on this list.
Two classes of recipients were then added: the relatively small group of refugees who could prove they had been denied swiss asylum during the war, and the much larger group of slave laborers utilized by firms with whom Swiss banks had financial dealings. The last group is mostly made up of non-Jewish Eastern Europeans who were never in extermination camps.
So when Norman asserts that the people now claiming money couldn't possibly be members of the original set of 100,000 extermination camp survivors who were left at war's end, he seems to be starting from a premise that has nothing to do with present-day reality, and then constructing upon it a scarily obsessive math. It's clear you don't have to be an extermination camp survivor to belong to *any* of these classes. And he recognizes himself that these are the three claimant groups involved (Holocaust Industry, p. 103). There are several other things about way Norman elaborates this particular argument that I find disturbing. But it's its collision with the factual basis that he himself states that puzzles me the most.
The slave laborers, who became the main focus of the Swiss case, and then set off the parallel German case, are overwhelmingly made up of non-Jewish Poles, Ukranians and other Eastern Europeans who never got a dime before. They are the first non-Jews to get reparations from Nazi successor firms or governments, which is a turn of events I would think Norman would be in favor of, since it emphasizes that Jews were not alone in being victims, and hence undercuts the recurrent claims for "uniqueness" that he so dislikes. These non-Jews are also the only deserving receipients for whom a successful outcome will make any real difference. 5,000 or 15,000DM won't make much difference to an old Jewish survivor living in Israel or the US today. But to an old person without a pension in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union, it could be a big deal.
If I were Norman, I would emphasize a different argument he made in his book, namely that it cost $200,000,000 dollars to audit all the Swiss accounts, and it is quite possible that all that money and four years later, the money found in dormant accounts that can be legally vouched for will end up being less than the amount spent to find it, which is exactly what the Swiss banks claimed in the first place. And since the Swiss banks said they'd pony up $200,000,000 sight unseen near the beginning of the whole process in 1997, they would deserve an apology on that account. This would require us to put an innocent reading on the destruction of 2,000,000 out of 6,000,000 relevant account records, but that's not an implausible claim. This is also the simplest argument against extending the original dormant accounts case to other European countries, who were much less likely to be the destination of such funds, and who would thus have even higher retrieval costs.
And I would then move on to his second very good point, which is that the two other main destinations of Jewish refugee money during the war were the US and Palestine/Israel, neither of whose banks are doing any looking at all, or are ever likely to. The reasons for this are pretty obvious, and they chime pretty well with Norman's long-standing concern with the use of the holocaust as an ideological weapon that purifies some countries in the present by anathematizing others in the past.
But claiming that holocaust fetishists are holocaust deniers is a bad argument. It's like when Jews call each other Nazis. It may be satisfying to see your enemies splutter when you use such a huge insult. But it's got nothing to do with reality.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com