“The Success is Their Own”: The Long, Arduous History of Reparations for Survivors of Vapniarka, the Camp of Death

Abstract A regime of extermination was imposed in the early months of captivity on the Jewish prisoners of the Vapniarka concentration camp in Transnistria, an area occupied by the Romanian authorities with support from their German allies, through the toxic grains distributed as food. More than half of the survivors remained either with paralysis or with some permanent after-effects. This article focuses on the postwar efforts to receive adequate compensation for the hundreds of Vapniarka survivors that were handicapped for the rest of their lives, and thus no longer able to work. These efforts were unique in the history of Holocaust compensations firstly because the victims did not fit within any of the existing restitution frameworks initially defined by the German state, and secondly because they organized themselves into a mutual aid group, an organization, to better lobby for their own interests. Over the years and the course of the various new Wiedergutmachung laws, the Vapniarka survivors encountered challenges to their claims denying them rightful compensations as Germany tried to place the blame at Romania’s door and Romania blaming exclusively Germany, not recognizing its own guilt. With the faithful support of a camp’s doctor, who kept detailed notes on the inmates’ symptoms and illnesses during captivity and after, the survivors, through the organization, started to receive modest compensations only in the late 1950s. Later, a German journalist working for Christian-Jewish reconciliation, set up an aid committee through which she raised private donations, and finally in the late 1960s, the remaining survivors started to receive a more just compensation for their sufferings. This is the first article outlining the trajectory of this story.