Living Through the Nazi Annexation of Austria “On March 12, German troops marched into Austria. I was eight years old. As I reached the vicinity of Helden-Platz I couldn’t go any further – there were so many people on the Ring Road and on the side streets. And I stood there and heard the yells, the […]
Assia Jassioukevitch was just 14 when the Nazis arrived at her Ukrainian village. She survived a mass execution of the village’s Jews, only to be captured and deported to a ghetto. Now 88 and in poor health, Assia lives in Berlin and receives a monthly pension from the Claims Conference, which helps her manage day-to-day. […]
Brzeziny, Poland is 12 miles east of Lodz, and its prewar Jewish population stood at 6,850. The Jews were herded into a ghetto in April 1940, where they suffered starvation, cold, disease, selections for forced labor, and punishment and torture by the Nazis. On Purim 1942, the Nazis ordered that 10 Jews were to be […]
Norbert Wollheim, a survivor of Auschwitz and the Buna/Monowitz labor camp, and the first person (in 1951) to successfully sue German industry for work performed while an inmate at a concentration camp, was posthumously honored as Goethe University Frankfurt renamed a plaza in his memory. The University renamed the Grüneburgplatz as the Norbert-Wollheim-Platz. The space […]
Resulting from the Claims Conference negotiations, the Federal Government of Austria has agreed to pay every living Austrian Holocaust survivor an additional direct compensation payment of approximately €5,000 (approx. $5,400 USD) per survivor. As we estimate there to be about 2,500 Austrian Holocaust survivors alive today, the total financial commitment is €12.5 million (over $13 […]