Bridgeport law firm comes to the aid of Holocaust survivors
By Judie Jacobson
BRIDGEPORT - Hungarian-born Sari Baron lives in Bridgeport. But she spent much of her teen years at Auschwitz, where she was forced to make bombs. Unable to walk after a bomb fell on her foot, she was left behind during the liberation.
Now, more than 60 years later, Baron is finally set to receive some sort of compensation for her work and for all she lost. She is among 25 southern Connecticut residents who performed work in European ghettos and camps during the Holocaust who are taking advantage of the long-awaited opportunity to claim reparations from their former homelands.
And they are doing so with the help of a leading Connecticut law firm.
The elderly survivors received free legal aid to file their applications from 14 attorneys from the law firm of Cohen and Wolf, P.C., arranged by the Jewish Family Services of Bridgeport and Aetna Life, at a special gathering held on Sunday, Sept. 14 at the firm’s Bridgeport office.
The lawyers helped the survivors navigate a complicated and, at times, personally painful application that covers everything from where the applicants lived during their time of persecution to providing a synopsis of the work they performed while living in a German controlled ghetto. Successful applicants can expect to receive about $3000 in compensation from Germany. The reparations are being made available through the Ghetto Labor Act, which was passed in 2002 to compensate "voluntary laborers," most of them Jewish, who toiled in German-controlled ghettos both before and during World War II. Virtually all the applicants say they are not doing this for the money itself, but rather for a sense of accountability by Germany for all the Nazis took from their lives.
Comments? Email judiej@jewishledger.com.