Saving History From the Shredder (Page 3)

Christoph and Giuseppina now had virtually no friends in Zurich, and nobody would give him a job. He received death threats. The Zurich district attorney was still charging him with violating the bank secrecy laws. He was going into debt. The Jewish cultural center provided a few hundred dollars and promised him a job, but it never materialized.

Then Ed Fagan, a New York attorney representing survivors, found him and asked him to testify in the survivors' lawsuit. Meili agreed, and then D'Amato invited him to testify in Washington before the Senate Banking Committee. Ostracized, facing a criminal investigation, Meili and his wife decided it was time to take their two children and leave for the United States. But testifying "I know will make me an enemy of Switzerland, a traitor. So I asked D'Amato, please help me. And he created a special law to give me political asylum here." Meili told his story to D'Amato's committee in May 1997. Congress passed the law and Clinton signed it in July 1997--making Meili the first Swiss person ever to get political asylum in the United States.

Meili's father's comment about getting a job on Wall Street with the help of Jews proved to be both right and wrong. Meili did get a job on Wall Street--but as a bank guard. He and his family moved into an apartment in New Jersey, and he took the PATH train into Manhattan every day. While he was still working there I asked what he did at his job. "Basically nothing," he said. "I have a uniform, and I stand in a hall, and that's it. I only say hello and good evening to people. Sometimes they ask me, you know, about the elevators, which floor and so on. I stand exactly seven hours and twenty minutes."

The job had one benefit: The bank gave him time off--important because he often speaks before Jewish audiences. He has visited Auschwitz with Holocaust survivors, prayed with Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem at the Wailing Wall and given speeches at temples and Jewish organizations from St. Paul to Pittsburgh to Miami to Beverly Hills. Meeting survivors at these events is, of course, an intense experience. Giuseppina explained: "There are certain people, when they start to talk about what happened to them, they scream. They really scream. That's very hard for us. Then there are other people who don't stop talking. And there was one woman who told us of how she was in Auschwitz and ashes were coming out from the chimneys of the crematoria and they were choking. Another woman told us, 'And then they killed my father and the blood was all over the white snow, and this was the red carpet that God prepared for his children.' Sometimes this is too much for us; you need them to put this away, or to say a prayer instead."

After more than a year working as a Wall Street bank guard, Meili was rescued by a survivors' group in Los Angeles--the 1939 Club--that raised money to get him out of the bank lobby and enable him to attend college. In July Meili moved to Southern California with his wife and children, and in September he will start school at Chapman University in Orange County, California--a 30-year-old with imperfect English, two kids and a busy life as a speaker.

He keeps up with the news from Switzerland through the Web sites of the Swiss newspapers. He has been preoccupied with the case of Jean Ziegler, a Socialist member of Parliament from Geneva who, like Meili, testified in the United States before the Senate Banking Committee about Swiss banks' wartime dealings with Nazis. Ziegler was charged with treason in a lawsuit filed by a group of prominent Swiss conservatives, who described Ziegler's testimony before Congress as "malicious lies, fabrications, calumny and limitless exaggerations." Conviction could result in a five-year prison term. In February, however, the Cabinet decided not to lift Ziegler's parliamentary immunity from prosecution. But the case isn't finished; he could still be prosecuted when his term in office ends after the close of the current session of Parliament.

Meili is also concerned about the future of the settlement he set in motion. He is an advocate for the survivors in what he sees as a conflict with Jewish organizations, especially the World Jewish Congress. The important thing, he says, "is to get the money to the survivors, not to the organizations." The World Jewish Congress is claiming part of the settlement on behalf of those who have died, which they plan to use to assist Jewish communities and rebuild synagogues in Eastern Europe and Russia. The key issue is timing--how quickly the settlement is paid. The survivors are mostly poor and very old. They need the money immediately, and every year more of them die. "They are not good at fighting for the money. Once they are gone, the Jewish organizations claim their share of the settlement. I like to support the survivors," Meili concludes.

Looking back on everything that has happened since that day in 1997 when he unlocked the shredding room, Meili now can sum up what he's accomplished, and he emphasizes it's not just Jewish victims of Hitler who have benefited but rather all victimized groups, past, present and future. Because of the evidence Meili found, he says, "for the first time in history we have a case that goes back [more than fifty] years and brings justice today. It means Milosevic has to know that his victims can sue him even twenty years from now. It means that Saddam Hussein has to take care. It means also that blacks here in the United States can also sue. Even Indians. All the time when I was young, I was searching for something to change the world. You have to find a tool, and this is a tool that works. Now we have a tool to bring some justice to the world. And I hope that in the future it also works."

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