America finally makes amends for Nazi Gold Train looting

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The Times
From Adam LeBor in Budapest



SITTING in her book-lined Budapest flat, Katalin Soltesz holds up a 60-year-old sheet of yellowing typewritten paper. The document is all that remains of her family heirlooms after her father Jozsef, a Jewish dentist, was forced to surrender them to a Hungarian bank for “safekeeping” on April 29, 1944.

Dr Soltesz was six when she and her parents were sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp later that year. The carefully itemised receipt lists her father’s modest valuables: a gold pocket watch, his officer’s uniform gold dress chain, his wife Rozsa’s watch, pearl earrings, and matching necklace.

The valuables of all 147 Jewish families in Torokszentmiklos, eastern Hungary, were sent to Budapest to be sorted and loaded on to the notorious “Hungarian Gold Train”. But the train was itself looted — not by Nazis, but by American army officers when they found it in Austria in May 1945.

After a three-year legal battle, the US Government has finally agreed to make amends for that looting. The exact terms have yet to be finalised, but a $25 million (£13 million) compensation fund will assist needy Hungarian Holocaust survivors. There are no plans, however, to compensate for individual losses and Jozsef Soltesz’ s valuables are gone for ever.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,171-1417455,00.html