Mr. Speaker, I rise today to discuss an important issue of justice for Holocaust survivors: the saga of the Hungarian Gold Train, and the role played by the United States government. As the Presidential Advisory Committee on Holocaust…
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to discuss an important issue of justice for Holocaust survivors: the saga of the Hungarian Gold Train, and the role played by the United States government.
As the Presidential Advisory Committee on Holocaust Assets, PCHA, first revealed in full in 1999, this was a dark mark on the otherwise heroic and exemplary role played by the United States in the treatment of Holocaust survivors. In 1944, the Nazis systematically confiscated the property of Hungary's Jews. A train loaded with stolen property was turned over to U.S. Army after World War II ended. Our policy and law required us to return that property to its rightful owners. Instead, the United States refused to return the property to Hungary--despite the pleas of Holocaust survivors. Worse, our government covered up the matter for half a century. As the PCHA concluded, the Gold Train is ``an example of an egregious failure of the United States to follow its own policy regarding restitution of Holocaust victims' property after World War II.''
As members of this House are well aware, the United States has been at the forefront of recent worldwide efforts to assure restitution and historic justice for Holocaust survivors. When other nations or their corporations have tried to use legalistic defenses, such as sovereign immunity or statutes of limitations, we have said forthrightly that there is a moral as well as a legal obligation to make historic amends. Sadly, in dealing with the claims of the Hungarian Holocaust survivors, our own government has taken the very approach we have decried elsewhere.
The survivors filed suit in federal court in Miami in 2001 seeking an accounting and restitution. The Justice Department has litigated this case in a manner that appears to ignore its moral dimensions, and that appears to contradict our bipartisan national policy on Holocaust restitution. It has sought to have the case thrown out of court--an effort rejected by Judge Patricia Seitz. It has insisted on taking grueling in-person depositions from dozens of elderly survivors. It only filed a substantive response to the lawsuit three years later. In that response, it chided the survivors themselves for lacking the ``due diligence'' to learn about the Gold Train, despite the fact that the government itself covered up the story and kept documents classified for decades! This sort of foot-dragging only adds insult to injury. The Department of Justice has a duty, in my view, not only to vigorously uphold the law, but also to pursue justice and seek fair restitution for those victims who lost property on the Gold Train.
The report accompanying the Commerce, Justice and State Appropriations bill makes clear the Appropriations Committee's concern over this issue. Report language indicates that the Committee is watching this case carefully. As I told Deputy Attorney General Comey when he testified before the Subcommittee in March, I have heard a great deal about this from Holocaust survivors. I feel very strongly that these individuals should not be dragged through further time- consuming litigation and court proceedings.
Mr. Speaker, I believe the judge's order that the Justice Department mediate the case with the survivors is a very positive development. The parties have agreed that Fred Fielding, the former White House counsel to President Reagan and currently a member of the Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, the 9/11 Commission, will conduct the mediation. I will monitor this process, and work with Mr. Fielding as necessary to see that justice is done. As the report indicates, it is important that the Justice Department treat this mediation seriously and at last resolve this matter in a way that is fair, compassionate, and prompt.
I believe that the most authoritative account of this case--and of the United States government's moral duty to compensate these survivors--was recently written by the Hon. Stuart E. Eizenstat. Ambassador Eizenstat was the Special Representative on Holocaust Restitution Issues during his time as Under Secretary of State and Deputy Treasury Secretary during the 1990s. He sat on the PCHA and is respected worldwide for his balanced leadership on this issue. He recently wrote an article in the Forward, the respected Jewish newspaper. I strongly agree with the thrust of this article, and I would like to enter it into the record at the end of this statement.
Mr. Speaker, simply put, justice delayed is justice denied. These Holocaust survivors came to the United States to build new lives, and our government has wrongly withheld the compensation which could have helped in that process. They have been waiting for almost sixty years for justice. They should not have to wait any longer.
[From the Forward, June 17, 2004]
Integrity of the Restitution Process Rests on Single Standard of
Justice
(By Stuart Eizenstat)
During the last decade, Swiss, German, Austrian and French
companies and their governments paid some $8 billion to
Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Third Reich, disgorged
thousands of dormant bank accounts, finally honored prewar
insurance policies and returned confiscated property and
artwork.
The Europeans paid reparations for their conduct during
World War II, and restituted property even though their legal
liability more than half a century later stood on shaky
grounds. They did so in significant part because the American
government insisted that they had a moral and historical
responsibility to those they wronged.
Now, however, the shoe is on the other foot in the
``Hungarian Gold Train'' case. The American government is
being sued by Jewish survivors for alleged improper handling
of assets stolen from them by the pro-Nazi regime in Hungary.
Faced with righting what may be America's historical wrong,
the Justice Department has forgotten our own message to
the world, and is relying on strict legal arguments to
escape responsibility.
This is the wrong approach and should be corrected
immediately, lest we lose the moral high ground that was
indispensable to achieving our agreements--and that remains
essential today to ensure our agreements are honored and that
other human rights violations are taken seriously.
The U.S. Army was not only heroic in winning World War II,
but also had an enviable postwar record in recovering Nazi-
looted property. Unlike the Soviet Union, which took away
valuable paintings and cultural property as war booty, the
American government never tried to enrich itself as the
victorious power. In accordance with international legal
principles and American policy, art and cultural property was
returned to the countries from which it had been taken. In
turn, those countries were expected to return the property to
the citizens from whom it had been confiscated.
But in regard to the Hungarian Gold Train, the American
government followed a starkly different policy. The train,
totaling 24 rail cars and holding countless Hungarian Jews'
valuables that had been confiscated by the pro-Nazi Hungarian
government, was seized by the U.S. Army in Austria in mid-May
1945, just after the war had ended. Despite constant appeals
for years by the post-war Hungarian government and the
official Hungarian Jewish organizations to return the
property--even to simply permit an examination of the
valuables--the American government refused. Even the American
Legation to Hungary questioned Washington's refusal.
Instead, the U.S. Army declared the Gold Train assets
``enemy property'' unidentifiable as to individual ownership
and national origin, making restitution infeasible. Instead
of returning the property to the Hungarian government, as the
French army did with other Jewish assets it seized after the
war, some senior American military officers requisitioned the
property to furnish their apartments in Austria. Other items,
such as watches, alarm clocks and cameras, were sold through
Army Exchange stores in Austria. More than 1,100 paintings,
some with impressive credentials, were transferred by the
U.S. Army to the Austrian government. A substantial amount of
property was sold for auction in New York, with proceeds
transferred to the International Refugee Organization to
benefit Holocaust survivors. A small number of items simply
were stolen.
None of the property, however, was returned to the large
surviving Hungarian Jewish community from whom the Gold Train
assets had been confiscated.
After successfully urging more than 20 countries to
establish historical commissions to examine their role in
dealing with looted Nazi assets, President Clinton followed
my recommendation to create our own Presidential Advisory
Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States. The
commission, headed by Edgar Bronfman--who played a critical
role in exposing the misuse of Jewish bank accounts by Swiss
banks--first publicly disclosed the disturbing facts about
the Hungarian Gold Train in an interim report in 1999 and in
a later report in December 2000. The Bronfman-led commission,
in which I served as a commissioner, did not flinch from
exposing misjudgments by the American government--just as the
Clinton administration did not hesitate to do for so many
years with other countries.
Our disclosures led to a private class-action lawsuit,
Irvin Rosner et al v. United States, by more than 3,000
Hungarian Holocaust survivors against the American
government, seeking an accounting of the contents of the Gold
Train; a search of U.S. Army posts for the valuables and the
return of any Gold Train property still in government hands;
and up to $10,000 in damages from each member of the class of
Hungarian Jewish survivors.
Instead of acting as we had urged foreign government and
their companies to act, instead of even calling for an
investigation of the facts to establish whether there truly
was the kind of culpability our presidential commission
found, the American government moved to dismiss the case on
the basis of the statute of limitations, the sovereign
immunity of the United States and the inappropriateness of
the federal court system as a proper forum for these claims.
The government has subjected elderly survivors to rigorous
depositions, and has used an expert
witness, the chair of Tel Aviv University's Jewish history
department, to contest some of our commission's findings and
the plaintiffs' more sensational allegations.
Even if the Hungarian Gold Train case is questionable on
legal grounds, and even though some of the facts remain
contested, the moral claim by the survivors that their assets
were not returned is solid. What, then, should be done now?
For starters, the mindset of the Bush administration's
Justice Department must change. We must hold ourselves to the
same rigorous moral and historical accountability to which we
have held foreign governments and their corporations. This
was the basic argument made by a bipartisan group of 17
senators, including Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and
Trent Lott of Mississippi, in a recent letter to Attorney
General John Ashcroft.
As reported in these pages two weeks ago, U.S. Federal
Judge Patricia Seitz granted part of the Justice Department's
motion to dismiss the Hungarian Gold Train case, but denied
other parts and has ordered the United States to submit to
mediation. The Justice Department should now take the
opportunity to allow the mediator to review all the records
and documents and to weigh the contested facts, including the
amount of Hungarian Jewish assets that was actually on the
Gold Train.
Of course, it will be almost impossible for survivors to
identify individual items that were confiscated from them and
to determine which items made their way onto the Gold Train.
That is why the Bush administration should apply the same
``rough justice'' concepts we used in negotiating with the
Germans, Austrians, Swiss and French--this time, for the
benefit of Hungarian Jewish survivors in the United States,
Israel and Hungary.
After all, it was no easier for slave and forced laborers
of German and Austrian companies to identify their employers.
Yet German and Austrian corporations and their respective
governments met their responsibility and paid billions of
dollars to survivors, Jews and non-Jews alike. The French
government likewise faced its moral responsibility to those
victimized by Vichy France.
Justice would be served if the mediator appointed by Seitz
was permitted to make a recommendation to the parties,
Congress held a hearing on the mediator's findings and on
competing allegations, and President Bush asked Congress for
a reasonable lump sum payment to be allocated on a per capita
basis to living Hungarian Holocaust survivors who file an
affidavit identifying their moveable property that was taken
in April 1944 by the pro-Nazi regime.
Obviously, the American government is only responsible for
what it seized on the Gold Train and failed to return. And
the amount should reflect that some of the assets were sold
for the benefit of Holocaust survivors in the United States,
a small number of whom were Hungarian Jews. The amount,
however, is less important than establishing the principle
that the United States will hold itself to the same standard
to which we have held others.
And importantly, a simple, straightforward apology should
accompany the payments for what was likely a singular
deviation from the otherwise sterling conduct of the American
military after World War II. The United States will then be
in a stronger position to continue to urge other countries to
meet their responsibilities--and we will have proved that
when the shoe is on our foot, we can wear it.