What a thoughtless Swiss diplomat came to call nothing less than a "war" against his country started with little things. A gold ring. A novel. A chair. Before long, a chain reaction of seemingly disconnected events, an assortment of powerful personalities and a series of Swiss blunders culminated in a moral crusade to track down stolen wealth hidden away inside the vaults of Zurich and restore it to the victims of the Holocaust. The proximate cause was money, but the soul-searing intent of the men and women who set the hunt in motion was to peel back the veil time had cast over the evils of Nazism and expose the truth.
For Bert Linder, now 85, it began the day in 1942 when the Nazis took his gold wedding ring. It was such a mean little gesture as they separated him from his loved ones. The Auschwitz ovens later claimed his wife and 10-month-old son and four other family members. Linder was one of only 2,000 to leave that charnel house alive, and so, he says, "my life was meant for something."
The idea to get money back from Switzerland's bankers, who bragged about their neutrality even while taking gold stolen, like Linder's ring, from the Jews, came to the California resident last July as he visited Austria on a lecture tour. In Vienna he read about how much looted Nazi wealth remained in Swiss banks and how others were trying to retrieve funds deposited for safekeeping there.
Linder, now rich enough not to worry, wondered instead about the poorest survivors struggling to get along, the ones without big Swiss bank accounts from the old days. "I thought, Why shouldn't this money be got for all Holocaust victims?" he says, and so he hired a lawyer to investigate, then threatened to sue the banks if they did not create a reparations fund. The banks were "negative, negative, negative."
But Linder is nothing if not tenacious--how else would he have come out of Auschwitz alive--and he made himself the bane of the banks. The Swiss press dubbed him David against Goliath. His lawyer bombarded the banks with letters and warned of lawsuits, but action was held up when one bank after another came forward with a promise to contribute to a fund. "My friends tell me enough is enough. But enough is not enough. The Swiss have the audacity to keep this money that does not belong to them and to make money with it. It should go back to the Jewish people."
For New Yorker Naomi Weisz Nagel, 56, the story began with precious coded letters miraculously smuggled out of Czechoslovakia by her parents in 1943. An aunt who survived the war showed her how the letters contained the numbers of a secret Swiss account disguised as a telephone number. But when she and her aunt tried to retrieve the money from a Basel bank after the war, officials said there were no records of the account. "Despite our specific identification of an account number at a specific bank, despite having hired a Swiss lawyer, the bank refused to return my family's money," says Nagel.