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Last update - 09:48 10/02/2008 The Dorner Commission / Please try to concentrate, sir By Adi Schwartz Tags: government stipend, survivors  At 8:45 A.M. last Tuesday retired Justice Dalia Dorner quickly crossed Warsaw Ghetto Square in the heart of the Yad Vashem Museum and made her way to the VIP hall in its corner. She entered the hall with an energetic step, but there the final preparations had not yet been completed. The treatment of Holocaust survivors by the State of Israel, the issue to be investigated by the commission that Dorner heads, has been widely discussed in recent years. But at 8:58 A.M., the sound technicians were still trying to fix a hitch in the microphones. The stage setting was minimalist. The VIP hall is no more than a large living room with about 40 gray plastic garden chairs. At one end stood a heavy wooden table and behind it three leather armchairs, for the members of the commission. On the table: a plastic bottle of San Benedetto mineral water and three throw-away plastic cups. Most of the garden chairs remained empty. Only a few journalists were discussing among themselves whether this commission would rescue the honor of the State of Israel. National Religious Party MK Zevulun Orlev, chair of the Knesset State Control Committee, which ordered the establishment of the investigative commission, circulated around the room like a groom on his wedding day. He took a seat next to Noah Flug, a Holocaust survivor and vice president of the Claims Commission, and a few seconds before Dorner entered, he whispered to him: "This is your opportunity. There won't be another opportunity and don't cut the Finance Ministry any slack," as though urging a workers' committee representative to improve his conditions. As though the Holocaust survivors have become another sector in the economy, like the teachers or the university professors. "This is your opportunity," said Orlev. "Your -- not 'our.'" Advertisement "We are not looking to lop off heads," began Dorner, clarifying immediately that her aim is not necessarily to ensure historical justice but rather to find concrete ways to solve practical problems. The identity of the committee members underlined this aim: Prof. Omer Moav, a lecturer on economics at Hebrew University, and Prof. Zvi Eisikovits, of the social work school at Haifa University. Flug, who took the witness stand immediately after Dorner's opening remarks, noted that during the decades of discussions of compensation for Holocaust victims, the Holocaust victims themselves had never been asked to participate. Perhaps no one noticed they are not represented on this commission either. Outside a wintry Jerusalem sun shone, but inside the hall it was as though we were in Europe, somewhere in the 1940s. Freight trains laden with Jews crisscrossed the occupied continent. Starving prisoners struggled to obtain a piece of bread. SS officers beat slave laborers with truncheons. Despite the stubborn attempt by the commission to confine its attention to practical details - the size of stipends, harassment by officials and legislative procedures - history conquered the room. Mengele was there, and the siding at Auschwitz, and Matthausen and the Gross-Rosen Camp and later also the illegal immigrant ships and the detention camp in Cyprus and the battles at Latrun and the disinfection with DDT. Dorner, too, addressed history. In her opening speech she quoted the prosecutor at the Adolf Eichmann trial, Gideon Hausner: "In this place where I stand before you, judges of Israel, to prosecute the case against Adolf Eichmann - I do not stand alone; with me there are standing here, at this time, 6 million prosecutors, but they cannot rise to their feet." In this, said Dorner, the State of Israel claimed for itself the right to prosecute in the name of the 6 million who were murdered. And what about the survivors who remained, she asked; have we as a state fulfilled out obligation to the survivors? But when the witnesses began to tell their stories, even the former Supreme Court justice seemed surprised. One after the other they took the stand and told their stories in chilling detail, colossal disasters that cannot be measured in terms of National Insurance stipends. "Please try to concentrate, sir" Dorner urged witness after witness but to no avail. "And what is your complaint, sir?" she asked, but did not always get an answer. Now and then, to get their heads above the torrents of detail, one of the committee members would ask: "In what year exactly did that happen?" At noon, witness Mordecai Wiesel took the stand. "For my 15th birthday," he said, "I received a gift. They took me to Auschwitz." Seconds later he choked and began to cry as he recalled the first night after the liberation when for the first time in many years he slept in a proper bed. Witness Avraham Berkowitz, a native of Romania who went through the Holocaust as a child, brought along thick books, maps and documents. He told of harassment in the displaced persons camps, insults exchanged between Romanian Jews and Polish Jews and skipped from David Ben-Gurion to Tom Segev's book "The Seventh Million" and from the literature and culture supplement of Haaretz to criticism of the level of research at Yad Vashem. "This is not within the commission's scope," Dorner interrupted. When she decided on a 10-minute break, Berkowitz scurried over to Professor Moav and tried to show him a map he hadn't managed to display. "Send the material to the commission by mail," ordered Dorner decisively and left the hall. Above all, it appeared the survivors wanted to tell the stories they have carried around for more than 60 years. Sometimes they addressed Dorner in German or spiced their remarks with Yiddish. Thus, repeated attempts by the committee members to focus the discussion on complaints and technical attempts to solve them collapsed again and again under the weight of the individual stories. When Wiesel began to tell how since the age of 20 he has suffered from cardiac and blood pressure problems because of the stay in the camps, Dorner stopped him and said that the committee did not intend to deal with individual matters and needs to see the picture as a whole. "Let us respect privacy," she requested. "Please tell about problem X and Y." "But, your honor," replied the witness, "this isn't X and Y. I suffer from cardiac and blood pressure problems." Nonetheless, Dorner did manage to elicit varied complaints from the witnesses. There are those who immigrated to Israel before 1953, who because of the conditions of the reparations agreement with Germany, receive much lower compensation than that of survivors who immigrated to other countries, for example the United States. Jews who remained in Eastern Europe after the war were not given any reparations under the agreement signed with West Germany, nor is there any direct connection between the damage a survivor has suffered and the amount of compensation. Flug noted that to this day the pension paid to SS personnel who were at Auschwitz is higher than the stipend paid to survivors. There was considerable of criticism of the Bureau for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled, which deals with Holocaust survivors. Bureaucracy, insensitivity and humiliating examinations are only part of the story. For example, recently the state determined that survivors who suffer from osteoporosis are entitled to payment for medications, but only if they prove that their illness stems directly from their stay in the camps. According to survivors, no doctor who respects his profession is prepared to certify that an illness in 2008 stems from events that happened in the 1940s, and in practice they are not getting payment for the medications. Hinting at a possible solution, Dorner mused aloud that the state ought to assume that the survivors illnesses were caused by the Holocaust and that if it suspects otherwise, the burden of proof should be on the state. During the next three months the commission is expected to convene twice a week, hear witnesses selected from among those who applied in advance to tell their stories and summon ministry officials and representatives of aid organizations. Dorner wishes to complete the deliberations by Passover and to publish her conclusions shortly thereafter. "Our obligation is not only moral," said Dorner in her opening speech, "but also legal in nature," since in the reparations agreement that Israel signed with Germany in 1953 on behalf of the survivors, the state relinquished the right to demand further compensation and the survivors "thus acquired the right to demand (this) from the government of Israel." Bookmark to del.icio.us   Will power Shas Minister Yitzhak Cohen says only a complete Gaza power cut will bring results. The cost of security U.S. estimate: Preparing Palestinian security forces for statehood will cost $7 billion.   1.   Nazi war criminals get Billions in German pensions 12:35  |  Jonathan S 10/02/08   2.   SS-men fat from German pensions 12:46  |  Jonathan S 10/02/08   3.   SO WHAT, no one is responding, why is that 12:54  |  Dror 10/02/08   4.   And IDF are better than Gazans 13:00  |  David 10/02/08   5.   To Dror - # 3 13:23  |  Zelda 10/02/08   6.   This time Jonathan is scoring. The problem is 13:40  |  Karl 10/02/08   7.   sad.. incredible injustice 15:18  |  Alex 10/02/08

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