Word: swiss
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Yorker Naomi Weisz Nagel, 56, the story began with precious coded letters miraculously smuggled out of Czechoslovakia by her parents in 1943. An aunt who survived the war showed her how the letters contained the numbers of a secret Swiss account disguised as a telephone number. But when she and her aunt tried to retrieve the money from a Basel bank after the war, officials said there were no records of the account. "Despite our specific identification of an account number at a specific bank, despite having hired a Swiss lawyer, the bank refused to return my family's money...
Leslie Gabor's mother trusted a personal code too. She started sending money to Swiss banks from Bercel, Hungary, in 1940, noting the account numbers and bank names on the bottom of a dining-room chest and underneath a kitchen cabinet. Transferring funds three times a year, she had amassed about $100,000 by 1943. In 1944 Gabor's mother, brother and sister were transported to Auschwitz. Gabor and his father escaped, but when they reached the family house, everything was gone. "All the furniture had been removed by the Germans. We no longer had the names and numbers...
...York City resident Rudolphine Schlinger says she too has proof her husband William had Swiss bank accounts. The wealthy furrier had made deposits before and during the war from his home in Versoix, Switzerland. But he died in 1985 without having retrieved the funds. Then a December 1996 article in the newspaper Jewish Week listed his account at Swiss Bank Corp. At a hearing last week in New York City attended by a representative from the bank, the 89-year-old widow appealed directly for restitution. "To you, sir, I ask, rather I demand, that you tell me what happened...
...nearing the end of their lives, in one last attempt to win restitution of what they believe is rightfully theirs, Nagel, Gabor and Schlinger have joined 12,000 Holocaust survivors in a $20 billion class action filed last October against four Swiss banks for the recovery of dormant accounts and looted property. Their suit--and the high-profile crusade by Jewish organizations, American politicians and Swiss activists--has inspired an unprecedented search through the darkest passages of 20th century history...
...Israel Singer it started with a book. In 1994 he chanced to read a Paul Erdman novel, The Swiss Account, that alluded to Allen Dulles' wartime role as America's top spy in neutral Switzerland. The hints of unsavory Swiss behavior enticed the ordained rabbi and former political science professor from New York City into reading a biography of Dulles, which made reference to a U.S. intelligence operation code-named Project Safehaven. Its mission: to track down Nazi gold and loot being smuggled out of the Third Reich...