Several years ago the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims [ICHEIC] published a list of German Jews who may have owned insurance policies they had to abandon, because they either were forced to flee Germany to avoid Nazi persecution or were unable to escape and were dragged off to concentration camps. In still other cases Jews were forced to sign their policies over to the Nazis.
The list was published on the Internet and was the talk among my community of North London Jews who were Holocaust survivors or their descendants. Jews, particularly those over the age of 60 without computers, phoned friends and asked them to have their children or grandchildren check the list for their names.
I logged on to the Internet and, in almost no time at all, found my father’s name on the list. I don’t know why I was surprised. My father was, after all, a successful, modern businessman with a young family, a person who would sensibly buy insurance. But neither of my parents had ever mentioned owning an insurance policy. It was never included in the list of items the Nazis stole from our family that my mother would at times recite with great anger.
After I secured an application form from Michael Newman, who is the director for Holocaust claims in the UK, I phoned my two sisters in New York. We agreed that our youngest sister, Lea, would be the claimant. Supporting documents were located and photocopied and our signed application was mailed in November 2003.
For two years nothing happened. Then, in August 2005, we received a form letter from an official of ICHEIC. Addressed to “Dear Claimant,” the letter explained that some claims were impossible to validate due to the ravages of war and the passage of time, but we had provided sufficient information for the Commission to conclude that the “individual[s]” named in our claim “possibly held some form of insurance.” For these situations, the Commission created a humanitarian award category and offered us $1,000.
A form letter, yes, but one that sent money. My share of $333 sat in a New York bank. The money meant nothing to me. It seemed to have nothing to do with our family. It was unrelated to the trauma of Kristallnacht,” the family flight to France, where my parents were interned in half a dozen French camps and my younger sister became a hidden child, while my older sister and I joined a Kindertransport to America.
Then, unexpectedly, we received a second letter, addressed by name this time. Father’s insurance policy had been found. The records showed “the surrender value was paid to him on June 19, 1939.” That couldn’t be right. My father was no longer in Germany on that date. But this was specific. It was about us. This was an acknowledgment in black and white It was the Nazis saying, 65 years late, ”We did this to you; we stole what was yours.”
Soon a third communication arrived - a photocopy of a document headed Ruckkaufsquittung. This repurchase receipt proved the existence of an actual life insurance policy that my father had taken out. It also explained the contradiction in dates. On June 19, 1939 it was my mother who was forced to sign the agreement giving away more than a thousand marks. It was all arranged a few days before she, my sisters and I left Germany. The proceeds of the policy were paid into a blocked account in the Dresden Bank in our hometown of Halle, so mother never got the money. Even if she had, she could not have kept it. A Jew leaving Germany was permitted to take out of the country no more than ten marks - in our case 40 marks for mother and the three daughters. That paltry sum was nowhere near the insurance payout of 1,147.84 Reichsmarks.
It was a repetition of another occasion on which the Nazis had forced my mother to sign. I remembered the rage with which she recounted how she was forced to sign over my father’s store to the Nazis for a paltry sum, less than a tenth its true value, and then concluding the story: “Of course, I never got even that money!”
At first I was upset when I saw my mother's signature, “Amalie Sara Kanner,”
on the Ruckkaufsquittung. Then
I became angry. My mother did not have a middle name, but she signed with one.
I understood at once. I knew the Nazi decree: Men without a middle name were
forced to adopt the middle name Israel. Women were assigned the name Sara.
Sara is the mother of the Jewish people. It is an honorable name. But it was
not part of my mother’s name. She was not Amalie Sara. Looking now at
this signature, I could feel her humiliation, as she was ordered not just where
to sign, but how. She would have been conservatively dressed, presumably wearing
a hat, because in those days women always wore hats when they went out, the
hat perhaps adding to her diminutive height. But in spite of her immaculate
outfit, her ability to maintain a benign expression to hide her rage, she could
not have stopped the rush of blood that would have colored her face, as she
signed.
This article was published in a slightly diferent version
in the January 2008 issue of the "AJR Journal."
Copyright (c) 2008, Eve R. Kugler