[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 103 (Thursday, July 22, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1510-E1512]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  THE CASE OF THE HUNGARIAN GOLD TRAIN

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. JOSE E. SERRANO

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, July 22, 2004

  Mr. SERRANO. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to discuss an important issue 
of justice for Holocaust survivors: the saga of the Hungarian Gold 
Train, and the role played by the United States government.

[[Page E1511]]

  As the Presidential Advisory Committee on Holocaust Assets, PCHA, 
first revealed in full in 1999, this was a dark mark on the otherwise 
heroic and exemplary role played by the United States in the treatment 
of Holocaust survivors. In 1944, the Nazis systematically confiscated 
the property of Hungary's Jews. A train loaded with stolen property was 
turned over to U.S. Army after World War II ended. Our policy and law 
required us to return that property to its rightful owners. Instead, 
the United States refused to return the property to Hungary--despite 
the pleas of Holocaust survivors. Worse, our government covered up the 
matter for half a century. As the PCHA concluded, the Gold Train is 
``an example of an egregious failure of the United States to follow its 
own policy regarding restitution of Holocaust victims' property after 
World War II.''
  As members of this House are well aware, the United States has been 
at the forefront of recent worldwide efforts to assure restitution and 
historic justice for Holocaust survivors. When other nations or their 
corporations have tried to use legalistic defenses, such as sovereign 
immunity or statutes of limitations, we have said forthrightly that 
there is a moral as well as a legal obligation to make historic amends. 
Sadly, in dealing with the claims of the Hungarian Holocaust survivors, 
our own government has taken the very approach we have decried 
elsewhere.
  The survivors filed suit in federal court in Miami in 2001 seeking an 
accounting and restitution. The Justice Department has litigated this 
case in a manner that appears to ignore its moral dimensions, and that 
appears to contradict our bipartisan national policy on Holocaust 
restitution. It has sought to have the case thrown out of court--an 
effort rejected by Judge Patricia Seitz. It has insisted on taking 
grueling in-person depositions from dozens of elderly survivors. It 
only filed a substantive response to the lawsuit three years later. In 
that response, it chided the survivors themselves for lacking the ``due 
diligence'' to learn about the Gold Train, despite the fact that the 
government itself covered up the story and kept documents classified 
for decades! This sort of foot-dragging only adds insult to injury. The 
Department of Justice has a duty, in my view, not only to vigorously 
uphold the law, but also to pursue justice and seek fair restitution 
for those victims who lost property on the Gold Train.
  The report accompanying the Commerce, Justice and State 
Appropriations bill makes clear the Appropriations Committee's concern 
over this issue. Report language indicates that the Committee is 
watching this case carefully. As I told Deputy Attorney General Comey 
when he testified before the Subcommittee in March, I have heard a 
great deal about this from Holocaust survivors. I feel very strongly 
that these individuals should not be dragged through further time-
consuming litigation and court proceedings.
  Mr. Speaker, I believe the judge's order that the Justice Department 
mediate the case with the survivors is a very positive development. The 
parties have agreed that Fred Fielding, the former White House counsel 
to President Reagan and currently a member of the Commission on 
Terrorist Attacks on the United States, the 9/11 Commission, will 
conduct the mediation. I will monitor this process, and work with Mr. 
Fielding as necessary to see that justice is done. As the report 
indicates, it is important that the Justice Department treat this 
mediation seriously and at last resolve this matter in a way that is 
fair, compassionate, and prompt.
  I believe that the most authoritative account of this case--and of 
the United States government's moral duty to compensate these 
survivors--was recently written by the Hon. Stuart E. Eizenstat. 
Ambassador Eizenstat was the Special Representative on Holocaust 
Restitution Issues during his time as Under Secretary of State and 
Deputy Treasury Secretary during the 1990s. He sat on the PCHA and is 
respected worldwide for his balanced leadership on this issue. He 
recently wrote an article in the Forward, the respected Jewish 
newspaper. I strongly agree with the thrust of this article, and I 
would like to enter it into the record at the end of this statement.
  Mr. Speaker, simply put, justice delayed is justice denied. These 
Holocaust survivors came to the United States to build new lives, and 
our government has wrongly withheld the compensation which could have 
helped in that process. They have been waiting for almost sixty years 
for justice. They should not have to wait any longer.

                   [From the Forward, June 17, 2004]

   Integrity of the Restitution Process Rests on Single Standard of 
                                Justice

                         (By Stuart Eizenstat)

       During the last decade, Swiss, German, Austrian and French 
     companies and their governments paid some $8 billion to 
     Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Third Reich, disgorged 
     thousands of dormant bank accounts, finally honored prewar 
     insurance policies and returned confiscated property and 
     artwork.
       The Europeans paid reparations for their conduct during 
     World War II, and restituted property even though their legal 
     liability more than half a century later stood on shaky 
     grounds. They did so in significant part because the American 
     government insisted that they had a moral and historical 
     responsibility to those they wronged.
       Now, however, the shoe is on the other foot in the 
     ``Hungarian Gold Train'' case. The American government is 
     being sued by Jewish survivors for alleged improper handling 
     of assets stolen from them by the pro-Nazi regime in Hungary. 
     Faced with righting what may be America's historical wrong, 
     the Justice Department has forgotten our own message to 
     the world, and is relying on strict legal arguments to 
     escape responsibility.
       This is the wrong approach and should be corrected 
     immediately, lest we lose the moral high ground that was 
     indispensable to achieving our agreements--and that remains 
     essential today to ensure our agreements are honored and that 
     other human rights violations are taken seriously.
       The U.S. Army was not only heroic in winning World War II, 
     but also had an enviable postwar record in recovering Nazi-
     looted property. Unlike the Soviet Union, which took away 
     valuable paintings and cultural property as war booty, the 
     American government never tried to enrich itself as the 
     victorious power. In accordance with international legal 
     principles and American policy, art and cultural property was 
     returned to the countries from which it had been taken. In 
     turn, those countries were expected to return the property to 
     the citizens from whom it had been confiscated.
       But in regard to the Hungarian Gold Train, the American 
     government followed a starkly different policy. The train, 
     totaling 24 rail cars and holding countless Hungarian Jews' 
     valuables that had been confiscated by the pro-Nazi Hungarian 
     government, was seized by the U.S. Army in Austria in mid-May 
     1945, just after the war had ended. Despite constant appeals 
     for years by the post-war Hungarian government and the 
     official Hungarian Jewish organizations to return the 
     property--even to simply permit an examination of the 
     valuables--the American government refused. Even the American 
     Legation to Hungary questioned Washington's refusal.
       Instead, the U.S. Army declared the Gold Train assets 
     ``enemy property'' unidentifiable as to individual ownership 
     and national origin, making restitution infeasible. Instead 
     of returning the property to the Hungarian government, as the 
     French army did with other Jewish assets it seized after the 
     war, some senior American military officers requisitioned the 
     property to furnish their apartments in Austria. Other items, 
     such as watches, alarm clocks and cameras, were sold through 
     Army Exchange stores in Austria. More than 1,100 paintings, 
     some with impressive credentials, were transferred by the 
     U.S. Army to the Austrian government. A substantial amount of 
     property was sold for auction in New York, with proceeds 
     transferred to the International Refugee Organization to 
     benefit Holocaust survivors. A small number of items simply 
     were stolen.
       None of the property, however, was returned to the large 
     surviving Hungarian Jewish community from whom the Gold Train 
     assets had been confiscated.
       After successfully urging more than 20 countries to 
     establish historical commissions to examine their role in 
     dealing with looted Nazi assets, President Clinton followed 
     my recommendation to create our own Presidential Advisory 
     Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States. The 
     commission, headed by Edgar Bronfman--who played a critical 
     role in exposing the misuse of Jewish bank accounts by Swiss 
     banks--first publicly disclosed the disturbing facts about 
     the Hungarian Gold Train in an interim report in 1999 and in 
     a later report in December 2000. The Bronfman-led commission, 
     in which I served as a commissioner, did not flinch from 
     exposing misjudgments by the American government--just as the 
     Clinton administration did not hesitate to do for so many 
     years with other countries.
       Our disclosures led to a private class-action lawsuit, 
     Irvin Rosner et al v. United States, by more than 3,000 
     Hungarian Holocaust survivors against the American 
     government, seeking an accounting of the contents of the Gold 
     Train; a search of U.S. Army posts for the valuables and the 
     return of any Gold Train property still in government hands; 
     and up to $10,000 in damages from each member of the class of 
     Hungarian Jewish survivors.
       Instead of acting as we had urged foreign government and 
     their companies to act, instead of even calling for an 
     investigation of the facts to establish whether there truly 
     was the kind of culpability our presidential commission 
     found, the American government moved to dismiss the case on 
     the basis of the statute of limitations, the sovereign 
     immunity of the United States and the inappropriateness of 
     the federal court system as a proper forum for these claims. 
     The government has subjected elderly survivors to rigorous 
     depositions, and has used an expert

[[Page E1512]]

     witness, the chair of Tel Aviv University's Jewish history 
     department, to contest some of our commission's findings and 
     the plaintiffs' more sensational allegations.
       Even if the Hungarian Gold Train case is questionable on 
     legal grounds, and even though some of the facts remain 
     contested, the moral claim by the survivors that their assets 
     were not returned is solid. What, then, should be done now?
       For starters, the mindset of the Bush administration's 
     Justice Department must change. We must hold ourselves to the 
     same rigorous moral and historical accountability to which we 
     have held foreign governments and their corporations. This 
     was the basic argument made by a bipartisan group of 17 
     senators, including Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and 
     Trent Lott of Mississippi, in a recent letter to Attorney 
     General John Ashcroft.
       As reported in these pages two weeks ago, U.S. Federal 
     Judge Patricia Seitz granted part of the Justice Department's 
     motion to dismiss the Hungarian Gold Train case, but denied 
     other parts and has ordered the United States to submit to 
     mediation. The Justice Department should now take the 
     opportunity to allow the mediator to review all the records 
     and documents and to weigh the contested facts, including the 
     amount of Hungarian Jewish assets that was actually on the 
     Gold Train.
       Of course, it will be almost impossible for survivors to 
     identify individual items that were confiscated from them and 
     to determine which items made their way onto the Gold Train. 
     That is why the Bush administration should apply the same 
     ``rough justice'' concepts we used in negotiating with the 
     Germans, Austrians, Swiss and French--this time, for the 
     benefit of Hungarian Jewish survivors in the United States, 
     Israel and Hungary.
       After all, it was no easier for slave and forced laborers 
     of German and Austrian companies to identify their employers. 
     Yet German and Austrian corporations and their respective 
     governments met their responsibility and paid billions of 
     dollars to survivors, Jews and non-Jews alike. The French 
     government likewise faced its moral responsibility to those 
     victimized by Vichy France.
       Justice would be served if the mediator appointed by Seitz 
     was permitted to make a recommendation to the parties, 
     Congress held a hearing on the mediator's findings and on 
     competing allegations, and President Bush asked Congress for 
     a reasonable lump sum payment to be allocated on a per capita 
     basis to living Hungarian Holocaust survivors who file an 
     affidavit identifying their moveable property that was taken 
     in April 1944 by the pro-Nazi regime.
       Obviously, the American government is only responsible for 
     what it seized on the Gold Train and failed to return. And 
     the amount should reflect that some of the assets were sold 
     for the benefit of Holocaust survivors in the United States, 
     a small number of whom were Hungarian Jews. The amount, 
     however, is less important than establishing the principle 
     that the United States will hold itself to the same standard 
     to which we have held others.
       And importantly, a simple, straightforward apology should 
     accompany the payments for what was likely a singular 
     deviation from the otherwise sterling conduct of the American 
     military after World War II. The United States will then be 
     in a stronger position to continue to urge other countries to 
     meet their responsibilities--and we will have proved that 
     when the shoe is on our foot, we can wear it.

                          ____________________