About 20,000 people in USA who were made to labor without pay in Jewish ghettos during WWII are eligible for $3,000 payments

Holocaust survivor Gisela Fischer prefers not to relive the memories of 64 years ago, when she lived and worked in a Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Hungary during World War II.

The four months she spent in the Matasolka ghetto, one of dozens established by the Nazis to confine Jews, was the last time she and her family lived together before they were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Her parents and younger brother were killed there.

Still, the 85-year-old West Palm Beach resident says, in 2003 she tapped into that time in her life to apply for a German pension for working as a cleaning girl in a hospital.

"I went through so much," she says. "Germany tried to keep everything. They should give something."

That's why she says she was even more pained when the German government said she was not eligible for a pension because she had performed forced, unpaid labor -- which meant she didn't pay taxes toward a pension.

Now Germany is offering ghetto workers such as Fischer who were denied pensions a one-time payment of 2,000 Euros, about $3,000.

Jewish organizations are alerting the estimated 20,000 survivors in the USA who worked in ghettos. The German government estimates that 50,000 people around the world are eligible for the Ghetto Labor Compensation Fund.

The U.S. Congress and Jewish organizations lobbied Germany after the country denied 90% of the pension applications from ghetto workers, says Volker Schmidt, a lawyer with Bet Tzedek Legal Services. Bet Tzedek, based in Los Angeles, helps survivors file applications.

"I need every penny," says Fischer, who lives alone and would use the money to buy medicines for her thyroid condition and diabetes.

Germany has paid about 300 former ghetto workers out of 14,000 applications it has received worldwide, says Gideon Taylor, executive vice president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which negotiates compensation programs.

In an e-mail from its embassy in Washington, the German Ministry of Finance says it offers the compensation because too many survivors did not qualify for either the pension or payment under a separate slave labor fund.

The ghetto worker fund is one of 63 reparations programs set up by 26 governments in Europe and Israel since the 1950s to compensate Nazi victims, according to the Claims Conference.

One of the largest dates to 1953, when the German government paid up to $8,000 apiece to Nazi victims denied liberty when they were forced into concentration camps or ghettos or forced to wear a yellow star. That program expired in the mid-1960s.

The ghetto workers program compensates survivors who performed unpaid and supposedly voluntary labor, from babysitting to digging ditches. The ghettos became holding areas to gather Jews before they were sent to concentration camps.

Helen Korb was 8 in 1941 when the Germans invaded the Belarus town of Mier and forced her family into a ghetto. She and her mother, Shirley Strozenberg, cleaned military barracks. They were paid with an occasional piece of bread.

She lived in the ghetto for two years before she and her parents were sent to a concentration camp in Belarus, where they escaped.

Her younger brother, grandparents and aunt were killed in the ghetto.

Korb, 75, is applying for the compensation on principle. She says the relatively small payment is symbolic and nothing can make up for her family's suffering.

"I don't think there is any compensation for somebody not allowed to be a child," says Korb, who lives in Los Angeles. "I don't remember having a childhood. I don't remember having an adolescence.

"My brother was killed. My grandmother was killed. My grandfather was killed. My aunt was killed. Everybody was slaughtered. Nobody can compensate you for what was taken away."

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