Canadian survivors seek return of property
Nate Leipciger was just 11 when he was forced to leave his home in Nazi-occupied Chorzow, an industrial town in Poland.
He grabbed his two most cherished belongings, a box of tools and a stamp album, but they, too, would eventually be snatched away.
“It was very traumatic,” he recalls. “Suddenly I had to leave everything behind.”
More than seven decades later, Leipciger — who spent three years in a Nazi-run ghetto and was spared death at the Auschwitz concentration camp after his father convinced a guard he could be useful as an electrician — is leading a charge in Canada to push central and Eastern European governments to return communal and private property taken from Jews during the Holocaust.
On Thursday, Leipciger, who moved to Canada with his father in 1948, was part of a delegation of Holocaust survivors and Jewish community leaders that wrapped up two days of meetings in Ottawa with the ambassadors from Bosnia, Croatia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Ukraine and the European Union.
Their goal: to make sure each country follows through on commitments made in the 2009 Terezin Declaration and implement a framework for restitution.
“Survivors are getting older and we’re becoming an endangered species. We don’t have much time,” said Leipciger, 87, a retired engi- neer living in Toronto.
“We’re looking at the situation and asking them to live up to their commitments.”
Some countries, such as the Czech Republic, have moved swiftly to establish a compensation process, while others, including Slovenia and Poland, are lagging behind, said Richard Marceau, senior government adviser to the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, which worked with the World Holocaust Restitution Organization, to co-ordinate this week’s diplomatic meetings.
Marceau said they are asking each country to develop a system that would allow Holocaust survivors — no matter where they are living — to file claims to have property returned to them or to be provided monetary compensation equivalent to the value of those properties.
“Of course they can’t get families back, but we’re fighting so they can have their properties back,” Marceau said.
Many Holocaust survivors are living in poverty and can’t afford to engage in protracted legal battles over property, he added.
Veselko Grubisic, the Croatian ambassador to Canada, said he had an honest and open discussion with members of the delegation Thursday and was touched by Leipciger’s personal story.
He said he asked the delegates to provide something in writing that he could pass along to officials back in Croatia.
It is difficult to quantify how much property has been returned to Holocaust survivors or their descendants as there is no central registry. But questions over ownership have led to messy court battles in some cases.
Last month, a court in Munich, Germany, authorized the return of a Matisse painting to the heirs of a Jewish art dealer.
The painting, Woman Sitting in an Armchair, had been looted by the Nazis and was part of a vast collection held by Cornelius Gurlitt, a reclusive German collector and son of a Nazi-era art dealer.
In February, the heirs of Jewish art dealers filed a lawsuit in the U.S. against Germany and a German museum for the return of a collection of medieval art estimated to be valued at $226 million.
The suit alleges that the collection, called Guelph Treasure and includes goldsmith work from the Middle Ages, was sold under Nazi pressure.
There are believed to be 14,000 to 16,000 Holocaust survivors living in Canada today, the third-largest survivor community in the world, Hank Rosenbaum, co-president of the Canadian Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants, wrote in a column this week in the Canadian Jewish News.
“That the past cannot be changed does not absolve us of our responsibility to survivors today, who deserve nothing less than a small measure of justice for their losses,” he wrote.