Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

With an apology, Germany returns reparations to Holocaust survivor’s kin

A German official has apologized to the daughter of a Holocaust survivor for demanding she return 72.55 euros that the government had mistakenly paid out to her deceased mother after she died in January.

And Germany will return the money — about $80 — to the daughter, who had written a check for the amount after receiving a callously worded letter explaining that her mother, having died, had no right to it.

Ayelet Gezow, whose mother escaped a transport to Auschwitz as a child, explained how disturbing it had been to receive the letter in a Forward story published last week. On Wednesday she received an email apologizing for the pain the attempt to claim 72.55 euros paid in excess had caused her.

“We have checked the facts again and we have come to the conclusion that you have not received the amount,” said Ines Krolik, a German official, in the message, which was written in German. “Should we have offended you with our behavior during the procedure, we are really sorry. Please accept our apologies.”

Krolik added that the pension office is reviewing the language in its standard letters for sensitivity as a result of Gezow’s complaint.

Born in Mannheim, Germany, Amira Gezow had been receiving 72.55 euros per month — in bundled payments that came every three months — as part of a reparations program undertaken by Germany’s pension office for contributions German Holocaust survivors were unable to make due to their persecution. (It was not the only reparations check Gezow received — she also received 580 euros a month from the Claims Conference.)


Get the Forward delivered to your inbox. Sign up here to receive our essential morning briefing of American Jewish news and conversation, the afternoon’s top headlines and best reads, and a weekly letter from our editor-in-chief.


Gezow died of complications of COVID-19 in early January — according to Germany, only two months into a three-month disbursement period. It wanted the last month’s money back.

The coldness of the letter and subsequent terse interactions with the German consulate infuriated Ayelet Gezow, Amira’s youngest daughter, to whom the letter was addressed. How could the German government be so heartless, she wondered, with the family of a survivor. Ayelet Gezow also never met her grandparents, who died in the Holocaust.

And though Ayelet Gezow had never received any payments from the German government herself, she also noted that the money in question wasn’t simply sitting in an account — it had gone to paying for her dying mother’s comfort and medical care.

“All I wanted was for the Germans to acknowledge my mother as a human being,” she told the Forward. “All they needed to say is ‘We are sorry for your loss.’”

Germany had responded that the amount exceeded the maximum it could write off after a person died, and that once reclaimed, the money would go to assisting other survivors.

Krolik’s email seemingly reversed that stance.

Ayelet Gezow was buoyed by the decision. “If I succeeded in preventing pain for any other Holocaust survivors’ families, then it was 72.55 euros well spent,” she said.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.