If a Holocaust-related program can be described as “jubilant,” the Oct. 27 premiere of “Reckonings: The First Reparations” at the Paley Center for Media in Manhattan is a striking example.
Here was a group of survivors, smiling for a group photo on a red carpet. Here was a film chronicling the birth of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Here was a panel discussion with survivor and activist Abe Foxman, film producer-director Roberta Grossman, Claims Conference Executive Vice President Greg Schneider and Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, about the power of perseverance.
Guests watching the photo shoot cheered and called out encouraging words. They rose to their feet after the film screening, applauded as the name of each survivor in the audience was announced and clapped in support of panelists’ comments.
The event echoed a recent trend in Holocaust filmmaking that focuses not on victimhood, but on the triumph of survival—the ways people resisted and hid, rebuilt their lives after unimaginable loss and suffering, and fight Holocaust denial and antisemitism. Commissioned to mark the 70th anniversary of the Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, and funded by the German government with support provided by the Claims Conference, the film provides a first-ever inside look at this restitution process. In “Reckonings: The First Reparations,” producer-director Roberta Grossman paints a victorious tale. In the September 1952 accord, also known as the Luxembourg Agreement, the West German government consented to pay Israel for the costs of “resettling so great a number of uprooted and destitute Jewish refugees” after the war, and to compensate individual Jews, via the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, for losses in Jewish livelihood and property resulting from Nazi persecution.
Through a combination of archival footage, reenacted scenes and interviews with reparations negotiators and recipients, Grossman takes viewers into the Kasteel Oud Wassenaar, a villa north of The Hague where Jewish, Israeli and German negotiators first come face to face, meeting despite death threats from their respective countries. She takes us to the private conferences of World Jewish Congress founding President Nahum Goldmann and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, to the fierce debates in the Knesset and the Bundestag, to the violent street protests in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and to the Luxembourg City Hall where the historic document is finally signed and sealed.
These first negotiations took place at a time when tensions were still extraordinarily high between the Jewish world and Germany. Negotiators from the newly formed Claims Conference, representing Jewish survivors outside Israel, decided to stand their ground by presenting a steely countenance to their counterparts across the table, and never speaking in German. They even left their cigarette lighters at home to avoid the temptation of being overly complaisant to a German negotiator wishing to smoke. Recalling the historic meeting, Claims Conference founding director Saul Kagan, z”l, later remarked, “At the opening session, not a greeting was exchanged between the Jews and the Germans. Every word spoken was icily correct, but no more. Every Jew at the conference was keenly aware of an invisible presence haunting that room, the presence of 6 million dead.”
“The work done by these leaders from both the Jewish and German peoples created the blueprint for the first-ever indemnification in history,” said Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Claims Conference. “There was nothing to base it on, no one had ever done this or negotiated this level of compensation—and all of this was done as the world was still learning about the atrocities of the Holocaust.”
Each agreement was its own complicated milestone to what would ultimately lay the foundation for the reparations that are—to this day—negotiated, expanded and distributed to Holocaust survivors around the world every year.
As a result of the 1952 negotiations, the West German government provided 3 billion Deutsche Marks in goods and services to the state of Israel over a period of several years to aid in the absorption of 500,000 Holocaust survivors, and dispersed 450 million Deutsche Marks to Jewish survivors living outside Israel. This was the first time in history that a state government paid reparations to individuals.
Since then, the German government has paid more than $90 billion in indemnification to individuals for suffering and losses resulting from persecution by the Nazis. In 2022, the Claims Conference will distribute over $700 million in compensation to more than 210,000 survivors in 83 countries and allocate over $720 million in grants to more than 300 social-service agencies worldwide that provide vital services for Holocaust survivors, such as homecare, food and medicine.
The reparations were never meant to compensate for the loss of life in the Holocaust nor to be exchanged for the forgiveness of Nazi crimes. Tova Friedman (nee Tola Grossman) is one of five survivors featured in the film and attended the premiere. One of the youngest people to survive the Holocaust, and one of the few Jewish children to have lived through Auschwitz, she lost more than 150 family members at the hands of the Nazis. The author of the 2022 bestseller, “The Daughter of Auschwitz,” Friedman has received reparations for nearly 70 years. “You can’t pay for the death of my family,” she said. “But when I was 15, my mother decided to fill out the paperwork for the Claims Conference. She had to take me to a doctor because they wouldn’t give me money unless I was sick. The money wasn’t for the suffering, it was because I had physical problems as a result of my Holocaust experience.”
In the post-screening panel discussion, speakers addressed the history depicted in the film and its impact 70 years on. “This is the first year the Claims Conference is working with the German government to advance Holocaust education and remembrance,” said Greg Schneider. “The most common conversation I have with survivors is, ‘Who will remember us?’ If it’s important to survivors, it becomes the Claim Conference’s mandate.”
After acknowledging the critical need for Holocaust education, the panel closed the evening on a positive note. “If the Claims Conference, Israeli government and German government could gather around this chasm, it is ultimately a hopeful model for healing—both for survivors and for perpetrators,” Grossman said.
The last word went to Abe Foxman, a hidden child in Vilnius, Lithuania, during the Holocaust who is now national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League and a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. “When I understood what I had survived, I realized that it’s not that people can do evil, but that people can make a difference if they stand up and act,” he said. “You can make a difference, save lives, prevent pain and anguish. We are all survivors, so we have the responsibility to stand up.”
For more information on the Claims Conference, visit claimscon.org. For upcoming in-person and virtual screenings of “Reckonings: The First Reparations,” visit https://reckoningsfilm.org/see-the-film/.
By Cynthia Mindell
