My 79-year-old mother received a letter from the Austrian Government a few weeks ago. You see, my mother, along with her family and many other Jews in Vienna, was forced to flee when the Nazis invaded in 1938. She was just ten but she remembers clearly the name of the Nazi Commissar, Anton Kaiser, who stormed her family’s home and forced her father to sign over the deed to their apartment, her father’s life insurance policy, his business, and all his possessions. She remembers looking out the window and seeing her neighbors kneeled over on the ground. Unable to understand what she was seeing at the time, she later learned that the soldiers were forcing them to lick the sidewalk while urinating on them.
Fast forward to today and the letter…The Austrian government now acknowledges, 70 years later, that much of the art that hangs in their museums belongs to victims of the Holocaust. However, the government politely requests, as it has many times over the years when acknowledging that so much of what the government has today doesn’t actually belong to it, that my 79-year-old mother be patient while it sorts out “the logistics.” My mother has had one heart attack, one bout of cancer, and a host of other health problems. Many of her Holocaust survivor friends are sick or have died. Certainly, no one is left from her parents’ generation, whose homes, businesses, and all worldly goods were stolen. Many of that generation, if they escaped at all, died young–heartbroken, overworked, or both. My mother’s father, kicked out of his beloved Masonic Lodge for not paying his annual dues (his membership lapsed while he was in prison being beaten by the Nazis), emigrated to the U.S. but died at the age of 49, struggling to feed his family.
“Be patient.” “We’re trying.” “We’re doing the best we can.” How do you feel when you hear this from a company, a government agency, even a friend? It’s happened to you, no doubt. Your credit rating is wrong due to some technical glitch. You call to have it corrected. You go through all the proper channels but check a month later and your rating hasn’t inched up even a point. You call again. “It takes awhile,” you hear. You want to scream.
