Word: swiss
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Estelle Sapir believes her dream has been locked away by Swiss banks. If she ever gets hold of it, she hopes to have a real bedroom, not one in which she sees a stove when she opens her eyes in the morning. She longs to visit her grandparents' graves in Poland, and the sites of the Nazi extermination camps where her father and almost all her relatives were slaughtered. "It isn't a very big dream," she says. "I just want to have enough money so I can pay the rent each month without having to worry...
...ensure the family's future in uncertain times, Jozef Sapir regularly deposited his profits in banks in Switzerland, $30,000 to $40,000 at a time. "He trusted them absolutely," she says. "It's funny. He was able to protect his money from the Nazis, but not from the Swiss...
What happened, Sapir and other Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust charge, is that Swiss banks implacably refused to hand over to the survivors of death camps or their heirs the money deposited in secret, numbered accounts before World War II engulfed Europe. In the 50 years since then, nearly all the claimants have given up their efforts, stymied by unbending Swiss demands for documents and records that were simply unavailable after the carnage of war. Hannah Greenberg, for example, was only five when she fled the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, leaving her father behind. Now living in Scotland...
...immune system evolve to reject something--an organ transplant--that didn't become common until the 20th century? In the 1970s a couple of outsiders, working in relative isolation in Australia, hit on the answer. Australian Peter Doherty, who trained as a veterinary surgeon, and Dr. Rolf Zinkernagel, a Swiss specialist in tropical diseases, figured out that the rejection response was actually a by-product of the body's basic virus-defense system...
...nails to hang pictures on the walls, which at Harvard is punishable either by death or organic chem, whichever you prefer. As I found out a few weeks ago, though, a tack hammer and a screwdriver make a mean can-opener, which is much more fun than the traditional Swiss Army knife...