Belgium to make $170m restitution for Holocaust role

Yesterday, Belgium's banks and government sought to make material amends, announcing $170 million in restitution for the Jewish community and families of Holocaust survivors whose property and goods were looted by Nazi occupiers.

Overall, $54 million will be paid to individual claimants, with the rest going to a Jewish trust that will help the poor and keep the memory of the horrors of World War II alive.

"In a certain way, justice has been done. Unfortunately, there are people who never came back" from the Nazi death camps, said Eli Ringer, the cochair of the committee on the restitution of Jewish assets.

Some 50,000 Jews lived in Belgium in the 1930s and about half died in the Holocaust.

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