Word: holocaustal
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...orders are changing. Under pressure from home and abroad, two high-level commissions named by the Swiss government are examining the issues of Holocaust-era bank accounts; Swiss gold purchases and commerce with the Nazis; and the country's less than hospitable treatment of Jewish and other refugees. The poking and prodding are forcing the Swiss into an uncomfortable bout of national soul searching in which their image as a proud neutral country--founder of the Red Cross, defender of democratic values, oasis of peace and multiethnic harmony--is being challenged by a more sinister image: that of a self...
...believed to have been looted by the Nazis from the central banks of occupied states. The issue of dormant private accounts first came up in 1962. Prompted by Jewish agencies and the state of Israel, the Swiss Bankers Association ordered its members to search for deposits abandoned by Holocaust victims. The process netted a mere $7 million, and though only 26 of 500 banks had bothered to respond at all, the bankers considered the matter settled...
...from a third. He gave them to a Swiss Jewish organization, which then handed them over to the police. Immediately suspended from his job by the private security firm that employed him, Meili is now being investigated for violating bank-secrecy laws. Bank president Robert Studer insists that no Holocaust-related documents were destroyed but admits that the shredding was "clearly a mistake, and we have to take responsibility for it." Studer, whom a Swiss court found to have defamed Meili by publicly suggesting "other motives" for his action, now bemoans the incident as a "catastrophe for our credibility...
...that is what comes of keeping grievances green, what does one make of the constantly returning memory of the Holocaust, of the refrain "Never forget! Never again!"? Specifically, what does one make now of the Jewish initiative to reopen the Swiss banks' World War II books in order to recover Jewish money deposited there, in the snug, smug, neutral Alps, as Hitler's apocalypse descended...
...range of reactions is interesting. There is the usual rolling of the eyes by the kind of Anti-Semite Lite who regards any mention of the Holocaust ("Not again!") as a bore and a kind of chronic blackmail, a moral collection racket. In an entirely different way, there are also Israelis who object to Holocaust remembering, because they think it a sign of weakness or at least of unproductive obsession. Some Jews who favor pressing the case against Swiss banks recall a bitter joke: in czarist Russia, two Jews are lined up against the wall to be shot; the captain...