Stephen Shooster in changing German laws for restitution to make it easier to get compensation. We did this at the Jewish Material Claims Conference against Germany. During the confer- ence, we petitioned our grievances for the survivors. A fund was already established, but few were paid due to technicalities. The administrators would find any way they could to reject claims. Copies of all the petition papers are in the archives of the Holo- caust Museum, Documentation and Education Center, in Hollywood, Florida. It was tough and frustrating work, but we did manage to get quite a few claims processed. Sometimes, it took a few years for approval and, because the survivors were aging, they were in desperate need of the money. In the process, we learned that over 50,000 survivors’ claims were rejected on technical grounds. In 1995, Germany established a hardship fund for survivors. With this fund, 50,000 Jewish victims from all over the world got a minimum of $300 a month. It may not seem like much, but it helped many poor survivors make ends meet. Another German survivor’s fund recognized ghetto dweller pensions. Ghetto survi- vors were entitled to a pension under the law. However, again, hardly any claims were approved because of technicalities. Settlement of a claim required proof of working voluntarily and getting paid while living in the ghetto and had nothing to do with being forced into the ghetto and work- ing as a slave. The law was not suitable to the survivors, as it was almost impossible to prove. So, nobody got compensation. To combat this, we participated in a class- action suit, and a delegation was sent to Germany. I was with them. We explained to the judge, “Show me one ghetto where people went in voluntarily and got paid.” We knew they couldn’t do it because there were none. Since the judges were young, they needed our testimony to understand the details. We won! Two restrictive paragraphs were removed from the law. Under the new law, a claimant only had to produce two witnesses to confirm that he or she was in a ghetto and, all of those who were already rejected had been given the right to renew their claim. I myself had been rejected prior to the change in the law. In fact, the reason I was brought to the grievance meeting was because I was an example of someone that had their claim rejected. Even though we won, it took five more years for a favorable result to weave through the legal process. These legal challenges are still going on. For instance, they did not want to give any- thing to children who were hiding. It took three more years to have them approved. This was a big success, as these were now old people who needed the money. One of my largest undertakings was to restore the grounds of Belzec and create a proper museum and sanctuary. We started to make petitions in 1988, but they stalled.
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