If there isn’t enough money to help out survivors, if policies on disseminating funds to the neediest are so rigid, how can a significant investment in a film be justified? Surely even a film that commemorates the atrocities of the Nazi death camps mustn’t take precedence over those who lived through it. Many feel they’ve been demeaned, dismissed and discarded.Īnd so it made me a bit queasy to read a self-congratulatory email earlier this month from the Claims Conference in which it boasted to partially funding “Son of Saul.” On social media, at town hall meetings and Meetups, thousands of children of survivors share their own war stories of trying and failing to secure aid for our aging and ailing parents and grandparents from the Claims Conference and the groups it funds.
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Over the years I’ve listened to the stories of scores of survivors, including my late father, about their experiences in applying for and being refused benefits promised them. One has to wonder where the bulk of the remaining funding is at the present time and how it will be disbursed in the near future when there are no survivors left. One such group, the embattled Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, better known as the Claims Conference, declared on its website that its mission is to secure “a small measure of justice for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.” It also states that the German government has to date “paid more than $60 billion in indemnification for suffering and losses resulting from Nazi persecution.”īut the group seems to operate with a distressing lack of transparency and a corporate culture of evasion and dismissal of the individual needs and concerns of survivors. Here in the United States, while some survivors are denied grants for potentially lifesaving medication or home health aides or even basics like food, these agencies choose to fund pet projects, including films about the Holocaust. The application process varies from country to country and agency to agency and the groups disseminating funds created their own restrictions.