Boris Fishman: Understanding Why Soviet Jews Fleeced the Restitution Fund
[Boris Fishman is a 2010-2011 fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.]
Last week, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York charged 17 Russian-speaking employees and associates of two Holocaust-restitution funds with defrauding the claims programs of $42 million. The suspects allegedly recruited Russian-speaking applicants and either doctored or invented claim-worthy stories on their behalf.
For me, the news served as a doleful affirmation: The alleged criminals seem to have had the same thought I did when I filled out my now-deceased grandmother’s application for reparations years ago. The details of her story were true: She spent 26 months incarcerated in the Minsk ghetto, managing to escape a month before it was liquidated and her parents and maternal grandparents were murdered. But as I considered the application’s thin verification requirements, I thought: How easy this would be to fake....
I was also born in the Soviet Union, where Jews like my grandfather had no choice but to live by the black market. Ostensibly a barber, my grandfather developed a clandestine barter network that would impress a CIA station chief. A haircut on the side for a stick of salami; salami for free Aeroflot tickets; free tickets for the ear of a powerful person in case trouble comes. The only way to get by was to cheat the system—there simply wasn’t enough to go around fairly. It’s hard to think of a regime that claimed to do as much in the name of its people while impoverishing them more—materially, physically, morally. It’s hard to fault an ex-Soviet person for feeling owed. But, as a character in the novel says, “the Soviets aren’t offering restitution. The Germans are offering.”...
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Last week, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York charged 17 Russian-speaking employees and associates of two Holocaust-restitution funds with defrauding the claims programs of $42 million. The suspects allegedly recruited Russian-speaking applicants and either doctored or invented claim-worthy stories on their behalf.
For me, the news served as a doleful affirmation: The alleged criminals seem to have had the same thought I did when I filled out my now-deceased grandmother’s application for reparations years ago. The details of her story were true: She spent 26 months incarcerated in the Minsk ghetto, managing to escape a month before it was liquidated and her parents and maternal grandparents were murdered. But as I considered the application’s thin verification requirements, I thought: How easy this would be to fake....
I was also born in the Soviet Union, where Jews like my grandfather had no choice but to live by the black market. Ostensibly a barber, my grandfather developed a clandestine barter network that would impress a CIA station chief. A haircut on the side for a stick of salami; salami for free Aeroflot tickets; free tickets for the ear of a powerful person in case trouble comes. The only way to get by was to cheat the system—there simply wasn’t enough to go around fairly. It’s hard to think of a regime that claimed to do as much in the name of its people while impoverishing them more—materially, physically, morally. It’s hard to fault an ex-Soviet person for feeling owed. But, as a character in the novel says, “the Soviets aren’t offering restitution. The Germans are offering.”...