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Boston woman rewarded for fight to win Holocaust money
The Associated Press
September 20, 2002
Greta Beer nestled into her black leather swivel chair with her cordless phone on Friday. Her frail hand with turquoise rings raised a tissue to her eyes as her voice cracked into the phone. "Judge Korman, thank you," she said. "You are a human being. You have given me a ray of hope, a ray of sunshine." U.S. District Judge Edward Korman was on the other end of the line. He ruled on Wednesday to give Beer a $100,000 incentive award for her services to relatives of Holocaust victims trying to retrieve funds left in Swiss bank accounts for safekeeping during World War II.
Beer, 79, whose family lost all its possessions to the Nazis during the war, is among more than a half-million potential claimants in a class-action case waiting to receive their share of a $1.25 billion settlement by Swiss banks. Korman is overseeing the distribution of the funds.
Thursday was the first time she has seen monetary reward for her efforts. The settlement money has not yet been divvied up. "For a long time, she was one of the only visible Holocaust survivors out there raising the issue publicly, at a time when most Holocaust survivors were in too much personal pain to do anything through public activism," said Morris Ratner, [Lieff Cabraser partner and] a New York attorney who helped negotiate the settlement. It was not a time "to individually take on some of the companies that profited from Nazi misconduct," he said. "And she did it. She took them on. On her own, very early on."