Final payments sent out to Nazi victims

Warsaw, Poland: During Germany's Second World War occupation of Poland, Jerzy Kowalewski paid a heavy price for helping the resistance.

The Nazis knocked all his teeth out, then packed him in a cattle car to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they ordered him to clean streets in 15-hour shifts and turned him into a human guinea pig in sadistic medical experiments.

Six decades later, Kowalewski, 83, gained a small measure of compensation for that suffering - about 15,000 euros (Dh72,579) - from a German fund set up to help surviving victims of the Nazis forced labour programme.

Now, after compensating Kowalewski and nearly 1.7 million other Nazi-era forced labourers over the past six years, the fund is sending out its last checks to meet tomorrow's deadline to finish its work.

"This isn't just about money," said Guenter Saathoff, director of the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future foundation that administers the fund. "It's much more about morality: These payments are one way that Germany recognises the wrongs inflicted on its victims."

But whether the payments brought the victims solace is another question.

Interviews with a handful of survivors throughout eastern Europe - much of which was invaded and brutally occupied by Adolf Hitler's forces - suggest the money met with gratitude, but also with bitterness as being too little, too late. And even with enduring rage.

"The Nazis burned my relatives to death before my eyes," said Markiyan Dimidov, a Ukrainian who was only eight in 1943 when Nazis set fire to four members of his family.