Led efforts to find funds lost during Holocaust
Greta Beer, whose struggles to recover her family’s savings led to a lawsuit against Swiss banks, testimony before a U. S. congressional committee and a settlement of more than US$1 billion for families whose assets were lost during the Holocaust, died Jan. 23 in Brighton, Mass. She was 98.
Beer grew up in Romania before the Second World War as part of a wealthy, cosmopolitan Jewish family. Beer was educated at a French-language boarding school in Switzerland.
At the start of the war, her father developed kidney disease. He assured his wife and two children he had put aside money for them in a Swiss bank account.
“He would always say, ‘ Don’t worry, kids, it looks dark, the war is imminent, but you are provided for, no matter what happens’,” Beer said in 1998. “My father believed in Switzerland, it was a neutral country.”
He died in September 1940 without revealing the account number or even the name of the bank.
As Soviet forces began to overrun Romania near the end of the war, Beer fled to Hungary, then to Austria. While in a facility for displaced people in Vienna, she married Simon Beer, a doctor.
They later lived in Italy before entering the United States in 1951. Beer became a U.S. citizen in 1956.
Her mother settled in Switzerland, and together they began to search for the family fortune. They went to dozens of Swiss banks, but in every case were told that no records could be found.
In the 1990s, an independent U. S. commission identified 50,000 accounts held by Holocaust victims. Swiss banks had claimed fewer than 1,000. Beer filed suit against Swiss banking groups and later joined a class-action lawsuit. In 1996, when the Senate Banking Committee conducted hearings on the matter, she was the first witness.
Grete Georgia Deligdisch was born June 25, 1921. Young Grete — who changed the spelling of her first name in the U. S. — attended schools in Romania and Switzerland, studied piano and spent summers in Italy. She was fluent in six languages. Beer was divorced in 1969. She had no immediate survivors.
After the Senate hearings and self- reckoning on the part of the Swiss, an out- ofcourt settlement of US$ 1.25 billion was reached.
In 2002, the first cheque, in the amount of $ 100,000, went to Beer “in recognition of her services” to victims of the Holocaust. Her father’s bank account was never found.