hIt wasn’t about money, it was a question of morality. “I’m concerned about correcting history,” Avraham Roet said in an interview in 2000. Fidelity.
As an advocate for Dutch Jews in Israel, Avraham Roet positioned himself from the 1990s onwards as a tireless negotiator to recover what was taken from the Jewish community in World War II, whether from banks, insurance companies, the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, or the Dutch state. He died last week in Zurich at the age of 96.
About the author
Anneke Stoffelen is a reporter for of Volkskrant and writes, among other things, about multicultural society.
Avraham Roet was born in Amsterdam in 1928 to a wealthy Orthodox Jewish family. He survived World War II by wandering from hiding place to hiding place.
After liberation, in his view, there was no other option than to flee Holland. What else could he do in a country that had abandoned him and his family to such a tragic fate? He set off by boat to Tel Aviv, to build a new life in the promised land. He attended an agricultural school there and fought in the Arab-Israeli war in 1948.
He later worked for Israel’s largest food manufacturer, where he introduced instant pudding (apparently thanks to a recipe he found in the Dragon-fly from his mother) and as an executive in the film industry.
But he will be remembered especially for his role in post-war reparations to Dutch Jews. “I wanted to know how much money was left in the banks, the insurance companies and the government,” he said in an interview in 2000. Free Netherlands“There had to be justice.”
“Deep disappointment in the government”
Ronny Naftaniel, who was involved in establishing the Central Jewish Organization at the time, recalls that Roet came forward in the mid-1990s because he wanted to claim what was owed to Dutch Jews on behalf of Dutch victims of the war in Israel. “He did it with determination and humor. He was never afraid to present things as they are.”
There are several explanations for why Roet worked so hard to gain financial compensation, says Naftaniel. ‘What plays a role is that he grew up in a fairly wealthy family. The house of his parents and grandfather by the canals of Amsterdam was filled with art. After the war, nothing was left of it, completely looted.’
Furthermore, Naftaniel says, two of his sisters were murdered in the camps; at least one of them died shortly afterwards. ‘Avraham was deeply disappointed with the Dutch government, which he felt had done absolutely nothing to save the survivors after the war. And it was also influenced by the fact that his father, a banker at the Rotterdam bank, had begun restoring Jewish assets that had ended up in the Liro bank after the war.’
Open
As a negotiator, Roet was “very tactical,” according to Naftaniel. According to him, this was mainly expressed in the negotiations on Jewish reparations at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. The role that Roet played in this cannot be summed up in a few lines, but the result was significant: if the Stock Exchange had started with an offer of 8 million florins to compensate for the lost shares, Roet eventually paid 264 million florins after strategic negotiations.
Roet remained involved in the discussion well into his old age and even recently spoke via video link at two symposiums on looted art. He never missed an opportunity to lash out at the Dutch government, which he felt had done so little to help the post-war Jewish community.
In the obituary released by his family on Saturday, he was praised for his “unwavering commitment and dedication” to all those who sought justice after the Holocaust. Roet will be buried in Israel on Monday.
