Six Million Ghosts

What reparations could ever make amends for the six million Jews wiped out by Hitler's Germany? "Dollars for the gas chamber--impossible!" cried the Ruhr's Westdeutsche Neue Presse. The Germans, cold and businesslike, did not want to dwell on these past horrors. The Jews, an official delegation from Israel, did not want the Germans to consider their unpayable debt paid. So no one talked about the wasted bodies, parchment-white, stacked high in Nazi extermination camps. Yet that was what the negotiations were really about last week, in a suburb of The Hague.

Specifically, the talks involved reparations for resettling in Israel 500,000 Jews who escaped the Nazis. The Israelis asked $1 billion, insisting it was strictly a cost figure, no damages included. The Israelis felt uncomfortable even to be discussing this subject with Germans, but their countrymen were hard-pressed.

The Germans stiffly conceded that they should pay cash, and muttered about a $750,000 total. But, they added, the Israelis would have to take their place in the line of 30 Allied creditor nations whose World War II claims are being negotiated in London. West Germany could only pay what it could afford to pay.

At this point, the Israeli delegation angrily accused the Germans of welching, and broke off the talks. The memory of six million murders flitted briefly across the inside pages of the world's newspapers, and then was locked away again.

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