BERLIN — Noah Flug was a teenager when he was forced to help build a bomb-proof underground factory in Germany.
“There were 20,000 people there from 19 nations — and every week 500 died.”
Born in Lodz, Poland, Flug survived 68 months in ghettos and concentration camps. Now 74, he serves as secretary-general of an umbrella group representing Holocaust survivors in Israel.
Roman Kent, also born in Lodz, was one of only five Jewish teens to survive out of 805 in a Nazi labor camp in Gross-Rosen.
“There is no answer, how did I manage to survive. There is no one explanation, not luck, not providence,” said Kent, who is now chairman of the board of the New York-based American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
When Rudy Kennedy was 15, he and his family were deported from their town near Breslau, Poland, to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
He and his father worked at an I.G. Farben factory there, said Kennedy, now in his 70s and head of the London-based Claims for Jewish Slave-Labor Compensation.
Before his father died, he added, “I promised him I would tell the world.”
On Dec. 17 Flug, Kent and Kennedy were among a group of former slave laborers meeting German President Johannes Rau at the presidential palace.
Rau offered atonement for the crimes of the Nazi years.
“I beg your forgiveness, in the name of the German people,” said the white-haired, 68-year-old president. “We will never forget your suffering.”
Rau’s statement came after the signing that day of an agreement under which Germany and a group of German firms will pay $5.2 billion to former slave and forced laborers from the Holocaust era. An estimated 240,000 slave laborers, mostly Jews whom the Nazis planned to work to death during the war, will receive individual payments of about $7,800.
An estimated 1 million forced laborers, most of whom were deported to Nazi Germany from Eastern European nations and worked under better conditions than the slave laborers, would receive about half that amount.
A portion of the fund will go to people who endured medical experiments at Nazi concentration camps, or who were forced to sell businesses or other property at bargain-sale prices by the Third Reich.
The German firms also “agreed to open their archives for legitimate historical research,” according to Otto Lambsdorff, negotiator for the German side, so that “money alone will not be the last memory” of this chapter in history.
Some moneys will be used for educational projects.
Although Germany has paid more than $54 billion in compensation to Holocaust survivors since World War II, no payments were made to those living in the Soviet-bloc countries during the Cold War.
Only a few major German firms have made payments to former slave or forced laborers.
Discussions on how to create the mechanism for paying Nazi-era slave laborers are expected to take several months. “This will be difficult, maybe even more difficult than the negotiations so far,” Lambsdorff told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper on Sunday.
At the ceremony, U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart Eizenstat, who represented the United States in the negotiations leading up to the $5.2 billion agreement, applauded all government and industry participants, as well as the class-action lawyers, for their roles in bringing about the agreement.
The lawyers’ fees have not been set, but it’s been suggested that the payment might come from interest on the fund.
With the deal signed and sealed, some attorneys who participated in the talks spoke freely of their disappointment.
“The companies are getting a free ride,” said Pompeyo Roa Realuyo, who represents some 10,000 Russian forced laborers. “I computed the total profits [of the participating firms] in 1998, and it was about $51 billion.”
New York attorney Mel Urbach, whose father was a war-time slave laborer, said the agreement came “too late for many people.”
His father died 12 years ago.
“When I sent my clients a letter saying, ‘I can get you x-amount of money or I can keep on fighting,’ one of them wrote back and said, ‘For me, a month is a year and a year is a lifetime.'”
New York lawyer Ed Fagan said his work is far from over. He is preparing to fight new industrial foes in Japan, England, France, Sweden, Italy and the United States.
He said when German firms open their archives it will provide “a paper trail to other culprits.”