Germans Reparations Are Long In Coming

Jews Were Forced To Work As Slaves

Many Slave Workers Were Just Children

How do you replace a lost childhood?

Any Holocaust Reunion Is Painful

Even picking up their $20,000 checks brings back memories

Germans Sign Ten Billion Deutschmark Reparations Bill

German Jewry Rises Like The Phoenix From The Ashes

German Chancellor Angela Merkel

Payments greeted with anger and gratitude

Jakob Kowalewski Was A Typical Victim

Jakob was a partisan during Germany's World War II occupation of Poland, and he paid a heavy price for helping the resistance.

The Nazis knocked out all of his teeth, then packed him in a cattle car to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they ordered him to clean streets in 15-hour shifts and turned him into a human guinea pig in medical experiments.

Medical Guinea Pigs

Six decades later, the 83-year-old Kowalewski , one of 1.7 million Jewish victims, gained a small measure of compensation for that suffering -- about $20,000 -- from a German fund set up to help survivors of the Nazis' forced labor program.

Kowalewski said the money meant a lot to him, but it just wasn't enough. He spent it on physical therapy and other medical treatments for his son, Adam, who was born with epilepsy and cerebral palsy -- disabilities Kowalewski blames on either the typhus injections he was given at Auschwitz, or a later experiment inflicted on him at Dachau.

Ukrainian Jewess

Dimidov, . She lost her grandmother, great-grandmother, 3-year-old sister and 2-year-old cousin were immolated by the Nazis in 1943 in what is now Belarus.

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Eight Years Old

Markiyan was 8 years old at the time, was sent to a concentration camp and did forced labor in Latvia

Ovens

Markiyan Dimidov testified - "The Nazis burned my relatives to death before my eyes,"

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$20,000 And Lifetime Pension

"This money helped me a lot -- without it I could have just died," said Yakov Sivakov, a 75-year-old from Belarus, who used half his money on cancer treatment. The rest went to fixing up his 1960s house in

Nazis Were Inhuman

Sivakov was only 11 years old when  he dragged heavy sacks 12 hours a day at a facility in Crimmitschau

Beaten Senseless Over Apple Core

He got two meals a day and was once severely beaten by a guard for stealing a gnawed apple core.

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Ten Billion Deutschmarks

"This isn't just about money," said Guenter Saathoff, director of the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future foundation that administers the fund. "It's much more about morality: These payments are one way that Germany recognizes the wrongs inflicted on its victims."

Interviews with some survivors throughout eastern Europe suggest the money met with gratitude, but also with bitterness as being too little, too late. And even with enduring rage.

Swiss Meet Jewish Demands

Their central bank turned over $1.25 billion in gold to Jewish victims.

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Article

Where Was God?

How could Nazis make six year old girls carry 80lb sacks, twelve hours a day. What kid of monster knocks a eleven year old boys teeth out for eating an apple core a Nazi threw away? And being strapped to a bed, injected with typhus, like some kind of lab rat.

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Auschwitz

Treblinka

Riga massacre

Paris during the war

Theresienstadt

Budapest Gold Train