The Hills Are Alive With The Sound of Music: The Accounting of the Swiss in the Holocaust

Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

August 14, 1998

When I was growing up I thought about Switzerland as the country which printed beautiful postage stamps and whose "hills were alive with the sound of music." Switzerland was the country that defined neutrality, the island of tranquility in the sea of European bloodshed. All the textbooks used by our children in high school and even college need to be removed and revised, for finally there is an accounting for sins that supercedes numbers. The Switzerland of my schoolbooks was a lie. The Alps did not hear the sound of music, but the sound of crying and of despair. They heard the sobbing of Jews rejected from its borders, refused shelter and sanctuary. After the war those hills heard desperate pleas from surviving children for accounts which they knew they parents had opened in an even more desperate attempt to outlast Hitler and have some provisions with which to restart life. They were told to produce death certificates for their cremated family members. The bankers demanded proof of their death, and denied all claims.

Because of the pursuit of "justice", a subject to which I shall return, it is now clear that those hills heard the words of sinister scheming, diabolical devising, and fiendish financial financing. Last May, Thomas Friedman wrote an Op-Ed Column in the New York Times entitled Cynical, Immoral, Neutral. In it he describes three types of neutrality. "One isprincipled neutrality – choosing not to help any side in any war anywhere…That was not the Swiss…Another ispragmatic neutrality. That is choosing to stay out of a war out of weakness but also refusing to help any side…That was not the Swiss…A third form is cynical neutrality. That is using neutrality to stay out of a war, but then covertly doing business with all sides, no matter how evil, to enrich yourself. That was the Swiss in World War II."

The Swiss banks were to go-between, receiving the money from European banks looted by the Nazis and the gold, removed from the teeth of our people before they were cremated, smelted down into bars. They exchanged this for Swiss francs, which the Germans used to purchase war material from abroad. Thus the Swiss aided and abetted the prolonging of the war, and increased the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.

The Swiss knew what was happening.

They knew where the money came from.

They knew where the gold came from.

And they cynically did business.

They evilly conducted transactions, behind the fig leaf of neutrality, behind the mantle of silence, and the cloak of secrecy. This is what the hills heard. The hills were alive with the sin of complicity and collusion in the perpetration of the Holocaust, and the denial of their part, for the past fifty years. The anti-semitic canards of the charicature of Jews holding money backs had the wrong faces. It would have been true with the faces of the Swiss bankers. They were the financial promoters and profiteers of World War II and the Holocaust. History books lied. We are not revising history. We are telling the truth, once and for all, out in the open, for all to see and know.

It would be a fantasy to think that just because the Swiss banks have now agreed to pay Holocaust survivors $1.25 Billion, that all is set right.

Can dollars, regardless of amount ever atone for what they did during World War II?

Are we to interpret their being dragged to the table, only agreeing to this because of the threat of financial sanctions, as their Al Chet?

Is the slate wiped clean?

Is the illusion of "Swiss neutrality" restored?

Are they forgiven?

To all my questions, I answer a resounding "No! No! A thousand times No!"

Money doesn't buy redemption.

Dollars don't acquire divine dispensation.

Francs can't finesse expiation.

*They can't bring back the dead.

*The value of the money, which they hid and denied, is worth twice the size of the settlement.

*And they waited and waited until many who would have submitted claims have died, and the rest are aging, many whose years would have been substantially improved, but lived in poor conditions and ill-health without adequate means.

*And the bankers have not admitted, openly, honestly, their crime and their guilt.

They have cut their losses.

They have protected themselves against future lawsuits and sanctions.

They have not said "Al Chet".

They have not klopt in hartz, they have not beat their breasts saying "Ashamnu."

This is what the hills hear.

Tomorrow's Torah portion is called "Ekev", a Hebrew word which is similar to the patriarch Jacob's name "Ya'akov."The name translates as "heel", because Jacob was born grasping the heel of Esau's foot. In the Torah portion it translates "If only". The Swiss have a choice to make before the bar of history and before God on high. By acts of contrition, by sincere acknowledgement of sin, by honestly opening all the records, by willingly cooperating with the survivors' search for records, ekev – if only they will do this, then the generation yet to be born, a little more distanced than I am, certainly further removed than the living survivors can consider accepting these deeds as atonement. But if the Swiss do not, then they and their fraud should be firmly tread upon by God's metaphoric heel and the step of history. God has promised that in the final judgement, "the high places will be made low."

May the deceased of our people know in heaven that the representatives of Am Yisrael here on earth bring honor to their memory by redeeming their dignity by our demands for justice.

May we strive to set the historical record aright.

May our children witness our demands born out of self-respect and self-esteem.

May we perpetuate the glory of the Jewish people and our faith through our lives.

Amen.