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Leslie Gabor's mother trusted a personal code too. She started sending money to Swiss banks from Bercel, Hungary, in 1940, noting the account numbers and bank names on the bottom of a dining-room chest and underneath a kitchen cabinet. Transferring funds three times a year, she had amassed about $100,000 by 1943. In 1944 Gabor's mother, brother and sister were transported to Auschwitz. Gabor and his father escaped, but when they reached the family house, everything was gone. "All the furniture had been removed by the Germans. We no longer had the names and numbers of the Swiss accounts." Now Gabor, 80, who lives in Lawrence, New York, cannot afford the 300 Swiss francs required by Switzerland to process a claim for those who live outside the country.
New York City resident Rudolphine Schlinger says she too has proof her husband William had Swiss bank accounts. The wealthy furrier had made deposits before and during the war from his home in Versoix, Switzerland. But he died in 1985 without having retrieved the funds. Then a December 1996 article in the newspaper Jewish Week listed his account at Swiss Bank Corp. At a hearing last week in New York City attended by a representative from the bank, the 89-year-old widow appealed directly for restitution. "To you, sir, I ask, rather I demand, that you tell me what happened to my husband's money."
Now nearing the end of their lives, in one last attempt to win restitution of what they believe is rightfully theirs, Nagel, Gabor and Schlinger have joined 12,000 Holocaust survivors in a $20 billion class action filed last October against four Swiss banks for the recovery of dormant accounts and looted property. Their suit--and the high-profile crusade by Jewish organizations, American politicians and Swiss activists--has inspired an unprecedented search through the darkest passages of 20th century history.
For Israel Singer it started with a book. In 1994 he chanced to read a Paul Erdman novel, The Swiss Account, that alluded to Allen Dulles' wartime role as America's top spy in neutral Switzerland. The hints of unsavory Swiss behavior enticed the ordained rabbi and former political science professor from New York City into reading a biography of Dulles, which made reference to a U.S. intelligence operation code-named Project Safehaven. Its mission: to track down Nazi gold and loot being smuggled out of the Third Reich.
Papers dealing with the project had begun to be declassified after the requisite 50 years, and Singer was fascinated by the possibility of digging into such secret government files. At least 130 members of his family were killed by the German machine in a single day. "They can't bring those people back," he says, "but they can at least give back to my mother, in her 80s, her wealth, her history and her standing." Singer asked his boss at the World Jewish Congress in New York for permission to begin an investigation of the Swiss accounts and got the go-ahead.