Germany has agreed to a one-time payment to survivors of the Holocaust who were children when they were evacuated from the country before the outbreak of World War II. Many of them never saw their parents and other relatives again, VOA news reports.
The New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or the Claims Conference, said Germany has agreed to pay $2,800 to the approximately 1,000 survivors of the so-called Kindertransport.
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the transport of the children to Britain from Nazi Germany and other places in Europe.
The payment is meant to be a “symbolic recognition of their suffering,” said Greg Schneider, a Claims Conference negotiator.
About 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, were transported out of Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland and taken to Britain.
The United States Holocaust Museum reports that about half of the children were placed with foster families, while the others were placed in hostels, schools or farms.
After the war, some of them remained in Britain, while others resettled in the U.S., Israel, Canada, Australia and elsewhere.
“This money is acknowledgement that this was a traumatic, horrible thing that happened to them,” Schneider said.
“After having to endure a life forever severed from their parents and families, no one can ever profess to make them whole,” said Stuart Eizenstat, former U.S. deputy secretary of the treasury and Claims Conference special negotiator. “They are receiving a small measure of justice.”