A total of 6,500 Holocaust survivors will get compensation from Germany.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, often known as the Claims Conference, claims this.
It claims that three groups of Jewish survivors will now get a €375 monthly annuity for the rest of their lives, retroactive to July.
They are the estimated 4,500 Jews who survived World War II's siege of Leningrad; 1,200 Romanian survivors; and 800 Jews who lived in hiding in France under the Nazi terror rule.
The recently negotiated compensation plan with the German government was a “landmark breakthrough,” according to Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Claims Conference.
“For many of these people, it's the difference between deciding to pay the rent for the month or the medicines or buying food,” Schneider told The Associated Press via phone from New York.
Nonna Revzina, an 85-year-old woman who currently lives in a Jewish senior citizen home in Berlin, is one of the new monthly pension recipients.
The retired librarian recalls being five years old when the Nazis began their siege of Leningrad in September 1941. She still trembles when she recalls how, from the sixth floor of her tenement building, she watched the events unfold as the city was bombarded by Nazi forces, supply lines were cut off, and hundreds of thousands died.
Revzina wiped away tears as she recounted her father, who died of hunger and sickness during the siege in 1942 and whose body her mother dragged away on a sled to a nearby location where hundreds of dead bodies were stacked up, during an interview with the Associated Press in her one-room apartment. She is still unsure of her father's final resting place.
The siege of Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg, lasted over two and a half years, ending on January 27, 1944, when the Soviet Army pushed the Germans out.
Although estimates of the death toll differ, historians agree that more than 1 million Leningrad civilians died during the siege due to famine or air and artillery bombardment.
“But in addition to all of that, there were extra measures that the Germans did against Jews,” Schneider said, citing examples such as Nazis dropping leaflets into cities urging residents to identify Jews and expel them, or sending spies into cities to try to instigate riots and then blaming them on the Jews.
"In the midst of this huge military battle, the Nazis were thinking not only about the Russians, not only about conquering Leningrad, but they were actually thinking about how to destroy the Jews and kill the Jews who were living in the city,” Schneider said.
Revzina said she was well aware that “had the Nazis conquered the city, all of us Jews would have been murdered immediately.”
The Russian mother arrived in Germany in 1996, a few years after her two adult children had done so. Revzina assisted in the raising of her three grandkids in Berlin.
With World War II ending 76 years ago, Holocaust survivors are now all elderly, and many of them suffer from a variety of physical problems as a result of their lack of good nourishment when they were young. Furthermore, many live isolated lives after losing their families in the war, and many suffer from psychological trauma as a result of Nazi persecution.
Many Holocaust survivors were left penniless after the war and are still poor today.
Working with Germany to increase the number of persons eligible for compensation is part of the Claims Conference's annual negotiations.
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