The German government will be paying out some $662 million to Holocaust survivors who are suffering through the coronavirus pandemic.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, known as the Claims Conference, announced the move on Wednesday. The Claims Conference, which has been the lead negotiator with Germany over restitution payments for decades, said that the payments will be disbursed over two years to about 240,000 survivors, many of whom reside in countries outside of Germany.
Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Claims Conference, told the Associated Press that while some survivors might downplay problems in their lives now, they still live with the pain of the Holocaust.
“There’s this kind of standard response for survivors, that ‘we’ve been through worse, I’ve been through worse, and if I survived the Holocaust, through the deprivation of food and what we had to go through, I’ll get through this,’” Schneider said. “But if you probe deeper, you understand the depths of trauma that still resides within people.”
Survivors of the Holocaust are elderly and face increased risks of contracting or dying from COVID-19. Many survivors also suffer medical problems in their old age because of the malnourishment they endured during their younger years.
Schneider also said many survivors struggle with poverty and extra costs associated with the pandemic, which have created a financial burden for them. He said that many are “teetering between making it every month.”
Schneider said that survivors in New York City suffered during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, which had most of its cases in New York. Since then, the virus has increasingly spread in other countries with survivors, including Israel, which has seen infections peak over the past few weeks.
“It’s a rolling calamity,” Schneider said.
The payments will be disbursed to survivors who are not receiving restitution from Germany and will come in two payments of about $1,400. Germany has paid out more than $80 billion to Holocaust survivors since 1952.
Worldwide, there have been some 38.3 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 1 million deaths since the pandemic began.
