http://dallasnews.com/metro/47188_HOLOCAUST12.html

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Except for the tattered clothes he wore, Max Biderman lost everything to the Holocaust.

Ragged, exhausted, he emerged from the woods near Lukow, Poland, in 1944 and learned all he had feared had come true. His parents, his brothers, his sisters, all dead.

Steve Hamm / DMN Max, left, and Helen Biderman are pictured in the reflection of a mirror in the foyer of their Dallas home.

"I couldn't find nobody, nobody," he said, the pain as fresh today as it was almost 60 years ago. "There was not one left alive."

SNIP........even their insurance policies were stolen, misplaced or simply not paid. A group of European insurance companies, at the behest of governments around the world and particularly the United States, has agreed to pay the holders or heirs of Holocaust-era insurance policies, using standards far less strict than they would for any other policyholder.

After all, few Holocaust survivors can produce paperwork. No death certificates were issued at Auschwitz or Treblinka. Those who managed to stay alive until the Allied liberation staggered home to find houses, businesses and possessions gone, and with them any evidence of an insurance policy.

"I've heard so many terrible things from these poor people, how they were stripped of all their possessions and not given a penny," said Mark Hanna, a spokesman for the Texas Insurance Commission in Austin.

"When you're in that situation, when you only have minutes before you flee from your house for survival, you don't reach for your insurance policies," he said. "You reach for your sons and your daughters."

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-- cpr (buytexas@swbell.net), March 12, 2000

Answers

This is so sad. These people are truly heroes. They deserve so much more.

Here is a really educational site about the Holocaust:

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/timeline.html

-- cin (cinlooo@aol.com), March 12, 2000.

Read "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), March 12, 2000.

but remember........not only were 6 million jews killed...there were also 7 million non-jews that no one seems to remember.

-- tt (cuddluppy@aol.com), March 12, 2000.

And 20 million more in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Hitler was an altar boy compared to Tovarich Joseph Stalin.

-- Dennis (djolson@pressenter.com), March 12, 2000.

Also check out David Irving's Action Alert -- you can download his latest book on the Nuremberg Trials for free.

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-- Squirrel Hunter (nuts@upina.cellrelaytower), March 12, 2000.

CPR, thanks for the post. Having spent the better part of the last 2 years working on a survivor's biography, this subject is close to my heart. I've interviewed, primarily, adult survivors who were, as children, victimized by Holocaust. Though time has passed, it has not lessened the pain for them. Many of them lost all their family members, and returned to a world that did not want them to talk about the horrors to which they were subjected. Many of them buried the past until the recent (last 10 years) Holocaust denial groups began to publish. Restitution for many of these people is all but impossible. Although the Nazi regime kept thorough records, tracing family histories is a Hurculean task. Many of these elderly people are not up to such a project. Not only is it emotionally taxing for them, but the physical rigors are too much. If any one of our forum community knows a Holocaust survivor, your friendship and help is usually appreciated. Relating what they have experienced is a delicate task to be handled with extreme care. Your compassion and silence, if they choose to speak about their past, is often the most valuable gift you can give.

-- Casey DeFranco (caseydefranco@mindspring.com), March 12, 2000.

These are/were the people that let their government disarm them and make their world a "safer"place by "gun control". Read Hitlers' manifesto for taking over the society with particular interest in the gun control section. The Bradey Bill and the actions of the current government are virtually a verbatim copy. Too often, the disarming of the populace is followed by a wave of genocide at the hands of a "government".

-- REvans (my2scents@home.com), March 12, 2000.

REvans, I must take issue with your statement, "These are/were the people that let their government disarm them..." The world was a very different place in the 30's and 40's. The Jews of Western and Eastern Europe had effectively assimilated into the populace of many countries who had rejected them for centuries. The Jews of Germany, in particular, considered themselves Germans first, then Jews. The evolution of the erosion of Jewish civil and human rights leading up to the Holocaust, was a slow, insidious process that was cleverly laid out and implemented. The Nazi's didn't just suddenly remove their guns. The Weimar Republic inacted gun laws in order to maintain peace in the face of growing Soviet dissention.

Those murdered in the Holocaust didn't 'let,' allow or permit their goverment any purchase on their lives. It wasn't merely an issue of gun control. It was far more complicated. The conclusion you infer is that had every Jew in Eastern and Western Europe been armed, the outcome would have been different. I disagree.

By making the statement you made, you have subtly laid the responsibility of their own deaths in the hands of the victims of the Holocaust. While I will neither support, nor defend the issue of gun control in my response to you, I do wish to point out that you have trivialized the deaths of millions of innocent men, women and children, in order to support your personal feeling about gun control in the US.

-- Casey DeFranco (caseydefranco@mindspring.com), March 13, 2000.