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WHY
THE MEANS TEST SHOULD BE STRICKEN
Sarah
Traister Moskovitz
1. The means test allows the
perpetrators of murder, slave labor, and suffering to discount
the grave injuries to the victims by ignoring everything that
victims have suffered by focusing only on present economic
state.
2. In no court where a
single civil or criminal action is under consideration would the
perpetrator be allowed to become the judge of the victim, whom
the perpetrator had robbed of parents, home, physical social and
emotional well being. Yet
not only is this the case in the present circumstances, but even
more bizarre is that all the damage done to the victims is
allowed to be ignored unless the victim lives at poverty level!
3. To require a
Holocaust Survivor to live at poverty level in order to be
considered for some token of justice and apology confuses
restitution with charity. Restitution
requires that wrongs perpetuated over long years of Holocaust
suffering be recognized regardless of the victims means.
To have lost your parents in childhood, to live all your
life with images of how they died, and to have been deprived of
their presence, encouragement guidance and love must be
recognized for the lifelong suffering caused.
The survivor's economic state is irrelevant to the crimes
endured.
4. Living beyond the
poverty level is no guarantee that the survivor does not live
with traumatic memories, nightmares, and vulnerability
throughout life to persistent bouts of depression related to
subsequent losses. We
must not ignore that the usual events of children leaving home,
a mate becoming ill, a financial set-back can trigger
catastrophic reactions of overwhelming stress in survivors
because it puts them back in to the earlier terrors of
loneliness ands loss experienced in the Holocaust.
And it is these consequences of having lived under Nazi
genocide that should be kept in focus for restitution.
5. When the United
States compensated its Japanese citizens for
having interned them in camps during WW II ( camps that were
neither slave labor nor death camps) it did so outright, without
requiring a means test.
6.
No means test is required for retired SS to pick up their
monthly pensions.
Sarah
Moskovitz Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus at California State
University Northridge
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