Who We Help

Claire Fallinower - France

Claire Falinower has lived in her Paris apartment since she was four years old in 1939, save for the years she lived in hiding.

In 1941, Claire’s father was deported to Camp Pithiviers. Before he died there, he drew pictures of Claire from memory, so he could look into the face of the little girl he loved. Those drawings hang on Claire’s wall, a last memento of the father she was too young to remember.

Soon after he was taken, Claire’s mother hid her with a family in Bretagne in Northern France, while she joined the resistance. Ill-treated, the 7-year-old longed for her mother. At the end of the war Claire’s mother walked 80 kilometers to a town she was told had been burned to the ground because she would not believe her daughter was dead.

Today Claire is widowed and lives alone. She receives payments from the Article 2 Fund and aid from the Claims Conference funds to CASIP-COJASOR, which have made her home accessible as she ages.
Learn more about Claims Conference allocations in Western Europe.

Klara Miller - New York

Klara Miller is tall with a regal bearing, thick wavy hair and large doe eyes. The baby in a family of nine, she is one of three that survived.

Forced to flee their home in Vinnytsia, Ukraine as the Nazis occupied the city in July 1941, her father contracted typhus and died on December 30. “He was only 50. I don’t know where he is buried. I don’t have any photographs. I don’t remember his face,” she says softly.

Klara survived the war with her mother in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. They didn’t know the language and had no home. In the summer months they slept out in the sand. When winter came, searching for a home, they were forced to “rent” a bathroom with the hole closed up. Unable to live there, Klara’s brother, not yet of age, volunteered for the army so his family could sleep in the barracks.

Klara has received a payment from the Claims Conference Hardship Fund. In addition, Selfhelp Community Services in New York, with funding from the Claims Conference, assists Klara in obtaining government-funded services. Along with the monetary aid, she is very appreciative that she can tell her story, saying, “Thank you for asking, for remembering. It means so much to me.”

Batsheva Rosner - Israel

In December 2009, a ceremony was held to open a renovated department for the infirm elderly at the Beit Bayer Nursing Home in Jerusalem. The Claims Conference helped fund the renovation to benefit the Nazi victims living there.

As in most such ceremonies, speeches were given by government and organizational dignitaries; however, one speaker stole the show. Holocaust survivor Batsheva Rosner talked of her life’s journey, a tale of strength and heroism that belies her current infirmities and difficulties with mobility necessitating a walker. She spoke of her youth in Hungary, enslavement in Auschwitz and work in a munitions factory, death march, eventual liberation and struggle to reach Palestine in November 1947 via Cyprus.

Batsheva said that although the whole world forgot about her 60 years ago, now she knows there are people who care about her. Her speech was a poignant reminder of the importance of the Claims Conference’s work.
Learn more about Claims Conference allocations in Israel.

Herta Salus - Germany

Hertha Salus turned 101 in September 2010, celebrating a century of strength and perseverance in the face of struggle and hardship. Herta was raised in Kaiserslautern, Germany until her family was forced to emigrate to Prague in 1933. She met her husband Erich in 1939. In 1941, the family was deported to Theresienstadt, then to Riga and Stutthof.

Miraculously, she found her husband again two weeks before the Soviet army would liberate them. “We were just skin and bones,” she says. The couple returned to Prague hoping to find their family but Hertha’s mother, father and two brothers had not survived. Erich and Hertha moved to Wiesbaden to build a new life.

Today, though Erich is no longer with her, Hertha still takes an active part in Jewish communal life. She received payment from the Claims Conference’s Program for Former Slaves and Forced Laborers, and relies on Claims Conference allocations to the Jewish Community of Wiesbaden for help with household chores, transportation, medication, and visits from a social worker.
Learn more about Claims Conference allocations in Western Europe.

Helen Kazman - United States

Helen Kazman was not quite 15 in 1942 when she was taken from the Klimintow ghetto to the forced labor camp in Starzysko, Poland. She never saw her mother and two sisters again. Working with explosives at the camp proved fatal for most of the forced laborers. Helen fled and hid, escaping with only a spot on her lung.

She met a Jewish man 16 years her senior who had lost his wife and children in the war. He took care of her and soon became her husband. She had her first child in Stuttgart, Germany, without ever having seen a doctor, fearing what the Germans would do to her if she went to the hospital. Helen arrived in Philadelphia with her husband and child at the end of April 1949.

Today she looks well and is lively and personable, but she has trouble walking, pain in her back and a very limited range of motion and much pain in her right arm. She relies on Claims Conference-funded homecare to help her bathe, prepare meals and do laundry, among other things. Emergency grants from the Claims Conference have helped her on occasion with medication, dental work and partial payment of health insurance.

Dr. Imre Lebovits - Hungary

Imre Lebovits was 15 when the Nazis occupied Hungary in 1944. His father and brother were taken to a labor camp and never returned. He and his mother were put in the Tiszafüred ghetto, from where he was taken to forced labor and his mother to Auschwitz where she was killed. He survived a death march through the Alps to Mauthausen and was liberated in 1945.

Imre is retired from his position as director of the Central Library at the Technical University in Hungary. He lives in Budapest with his family and works to help obtain moral and financial recognition for Hungarians who saved Jews.

He receives payments from the Claims Conference’s Central and Eastern European Fund and received compensation from the Claims Conference Program for Former Slave and Forced Laborers, including a supplemental payment made in 2007 from Austrian funds to certain survivors in Eastern Europe. “The payments I receive from the Claims Conference contribute to my devotion to keep the memory of the Holocaust and give recognition both to those who were victims, and to those who were heroes of history,” Imre says.

Esther Solomon - Israel

Esther Solomon was born in March 1935 in Romania, the youngest of 10 children. With the onset of fascism her brother took her to a Jewish orphanage in Budapest, Hungary. Her childhood memories include hiding in a storeroom during the bombings of Budapest, cold and starvation, escaping a firing squad on the Danube River and the people who helped her survive.

Esther arrived in Israel at age 13 with other children from the orphanage, two weeks before the Israeli War of Independence. She lived on Kibbutz Ramat Hashofet and joined the Israeli army. Later, she married her husband, Simon, also a Holocaust survivor who worked during the war as a forced laborer in Bacau.

More than 50 years later, Yad Vashem helped Esther find three of her brothers who survived the Holocaust. As far as she knows the rest of her family was murdered in Auschwitz.

She received payment from the Claims Conference’s Program for Former Slave and Forced Laborers, as well as a payment as her husband’s heir.

Micheline Papiernik - Argentina

Micheline Papiernik was born in Paris, France in 1925. During the war, she lived in hiding with false documents. Her parents and sister were deported to Auschwitz where they perished. Micheline met her husband Charles, a survivor of Auschwitz after liberation in 1945. They married and settled in Uruguay and later in Buenos Aires.

Micheline has received payments from the Claims Conference Article 2 Fund since 2004. "I'm very grateful for the help I receive from the Claims Conference. Without the Article 2 pension, it would be very difficult to maintain myself economically and pay for costly medicines and medical attention for my husband who is very sick," says Micheline. "I also feel that the pension is a gesture of recognition of my persecution in Europe during the Shoah." Charles receives a BEG pension from Germany as a result of Claims Conference negotiations in 1952.

Micheline and her husband also receive assistance with medical costs and in-home care from Fundacion Tzedaka, a Claims Conference-funded agency.

Pinchus Nachutin - Ukraine

Pinchus was born in 1926 in the Ingulets shtetl in the Ukraine. When the Nazis came to the area, Pinchus's family and 300 others were transported to a remote village and forced to build a road used for Nazi soldiers. They lived in a stable, on minimal food, working 20 hours per day with convoys shooting anyone who tried to escape. His family was later moved to the Novoukrainsky Ghetto. In 1942 100 Jews from the ghetto, including Pinchus's parents, were taken to a mine and shot.

Later in 1942, all the remaining Jews in the Novoukrainsky Ghetto were shot. However, Pinchus survived by pretending to be one of the dead and managed to crawl out and run away. He hid until liberation in 1944, then went on to serve on the front as a mine-layer and was severely wounded.

Pinchus is widowed and lives alone on a small pension. He has received payments from the Claims Conference Central and Eastern European Fund since 2000.

Sara Politzer - United States

Sara Politzer was born in 1926 in Budapest, Hungary.  In July 1944, at age 17, she was transported with her parents and her youngest brother to Auschwitz.  She spent six weeks in Auschwitz before being transported to a forced labor factory.  A few months later, ahead of the Russian troops, Sara was transported to Bergen-Belsen where she remained until liberation on April 15, 1945.  Due to illness the Red Cross flew her to Sweden, where she remained until August 1946, when she returned to Budapest. She came to New York in 1956 with her husband and young son.   

The support she receives through Selfhelp Community Services, funded by the Claims Conference, includes emergency financial assistance and bi-weekly housekeeping and chore assistance. Sara’s social worker from Selfhelp provides ongoing supportive counseling around issues of aging, family relationships, and declining health. Her social worker also assists Sara with obtaining benefits to which she is entitled, recently helping her enroll in an affordable Medicare prescription drug plan and apply for Medicaid. 

Kurt Seideman - Sweden

Kurt Seideman came to Sweden from Germany as a teenager after the Holocaust. He is diabetic, almost blind, and nearly home-bound. He was recently widowed and has no family support. With a grant from the Claims Conference, the Jewish community of Stockholm is able to provide him with a social worker, who visits his home weekly, prepares meals and accompanies him to appointments.

Shifra Proshenovski - Israel

Shifra Proshenovski, 80, displays the number tattooed on her arm during the Holocaust. She is a victim of the Warsaw ghetto, the Starachowice ghetto, Auschwitz-Birkenau and was forced on a death march. During her suffering, she was blinded in her left eye.

Today she struggles with serious health problems that affect her heart and balance. Through a Claims Conference grant, the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel provides Shifra with essential in-home nursing care each week.

Boris Rabiner - United States

Boris Rabiner was born in 1925 in the Vinnitsa Region of Ukraine. He was a high school student in 1941 when Germans attacked the region. He fled on foot and by cart, finally making it to Kirgyzia.

In 1943 Mr. Rabiner turned 18 and joined the Soviet army. He fought on the front line for two years and lost his leg in battle. After the war he returned to Vinnitsa to study history.

He worked as a high school teacher and lecturer from 1949-1992 and also gave many lectures on the history of World War II. He emigrated to the United States in 1992.

In 1994 Mr. Rabiner received the Hardship Fund payment. “I never wanted their money”, Mr. Rabiner says. “Money cannot make up for what they did. But it’s only just and fair that thanks to the Claims Conference efforts I’ve been able to get some help when it was most needed.”

Serah Schwartz - Australia

Serah Schwartz was born in Romania in 1926. In 1944, the Nazis rounded up her family, living in the Transylvania region, and marched them 15 kilometers to Satu Mare, where the Jews were forced into a ghetto. Soon after, her family was sent to Auschwitz. In October 1944, Serah was sent to Thereisienstadt, from where she was liberated in 1945.

Serah and her family emigrated to Australia in 1960. Her husband recently passed away.

Serah began attending the "Club 50" drop-in center of JewishCare in Sydney in 1995, where she participates in social programs, meetings, and lectures. She also receives some home support from JewishCare, which has a complete assistance program for Nazi victims funded by the Claims Conference. Serah receives pension payments from the Claims Conference Article 2 Fund and received a payment from the Claims Conference Program for Former Slave and Forced Laborers.

Julius Kaufman - United States

Julius Kaufman was 19 when the Germans took Lodz in 1939. A modest man with modest ambitions, he stayed behind as his friends ran towards Russia, unwilling to leave his parents and siblings without a means of support. Even with his support though, it was a constant struggle against hunger. Julius wrote, “The Germans did not give us enough food to live on, and not enough to die on.”

He lived in the ghetto for almost 5 years, battling constant hunger, before arriving in Auschwitz on August 18, 1944. For the next year he was moved from one work camp to another. When he arrived in a Swedish hospital in July 1945 he weighed 90 lbs.

Living and working in Sweden for nine years after the war, he lost his wife in childbirth. Raising two little girls alone, he came to the U.S. Settling in Philadelphia, he remarried and raised his girls. At 89 years old, he is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and relies on a homecare worker, provided by Claims Conference funds, to do his grocery shopping and pick up his prescribed medication.