by Mike Kelly
What Flatow heard was not much help, though. Surgeons at the hospital operated on Alisa and she was now in the hospital’s intensive care unit. Flatow’s mind raced with questions.
What kind of operation? And what were Alisa’s injuries?
The doctor would not say.
Flatow hung up. Shortly, the phone rang again. It was another man from the hospital. He asked Flatow to come to Israel right away.
Flatow noticed that no one from the State Department or the US Embassy or the hospital had yet told him much about Alisa’s injuries. Flatow assumed that his daughter had been struck by shrapnel. But how? And what part of her body?
“Where was she injured?” Flatow asked.
“In the head,” the man from the hospital said.
Flatow paused.
“What’s her prognosis?” he asked, still trying to maintain his lawyer’s logical methodology of chronicling information.
Flatow sensed the man on the phone seemed uneasy.
“You should come right away,” the man said.
Flatow hung up.
A friend, Paul Wolf, booked two tickets for a flight on the Israeli airline, El Al—for himself and Flatow. But the flight was leaving at 1 p.m. from John F. Kennedy International Airport, some twenty-five miles away on the edge of the New York City borough of Queens. Flatow threw some clothes in a bag.
It was now after 11:30 a.m.
The phone rang again. It was New Jersey’s US Senator Frank Lautenberg. He was in Israel and heard from the American ambassador, Martin Indyk, that Alisa had been injured. Could he do anything?
Flatow rattled off what little information he knew, mentioned he was catching a flight to Israel, thanked Lautenberg and hung up.
The phone rang again. A rabbi was on the line. He heard that Alisa had been in injured and that Flatow was flying to Israel. The rabbi had a suggestion for how Flatow could pass the time on the ten-hour flight: Read the psalms and promise to make charitable pledges.
Flatow thanked the rabbi, hung up and ran out the door. An hour later, he boarded an El Al 747 jetliner. As the giant plane headed across the Atlantic, Flatow tried to read the psalms. He tried to sleep.
But he could not relax.
“What the hell am I doing?” he thought to himself.
He stared at the video screen on the back of the seat in front him and turned on a channel that charted the flight route to Israel.
“My mind was a blank,” Flatow said. “I didn’t know what I was thinking.”
He was still wearing the same clothes he wore to the synagogue that morning.
The 747 touched down at Ben Gurion International Airport just after 7:30 a.m. on Monday, April 10. Flatow looked out the window and noticed a white Chevrolet suburban waiting on the tarmac beside two Israeli police cruisers. A flight attendant came to his seat.
Flatow would be the first off the plane.
Two US Embassy staffers guided him to the Chevy Suburban. Flatow settled into the back seat with Paul Wolf, now joined by Wolf’s son, Daniel, who had flown in from London and spoke fluent Hebrew.
The Suburban quieted. The embassy staffers were not talking. Flatow sensed the need to break the ice.
He turned to Wolf’s son.
“Daniel, so who do we sue in this situation?”
It was a poor attempt at a joke. But Flatow felt hollow. It had been more than twenty-four hours since the attack on the bus in Kfar Darom and he still had no idea of his daughter’s condition—only that she had been injured in the head.
The drive from the airport to the hospital in Beersheba took almost two hours. A doctor guided Flatow to the intensive care unit and into a room with four beds.
Alisa was in the corner bed. Her eyes were closed and her face was slightly puffy. Her shoulder-length hair had not been cut, but Flatow noticed the bandage on the back of her head.
A ventilator purred. A tube had been placed in Alisa’s mouth. Her arm was connected to an IV.
Flatow reached for Alisa’s hand. It felt warm. He then leaned toward his daughter’s head, his mouth near her ear. “Everything’s going to be okay,” he said. “Daddy’s here.”
Flatow straightened up and paused for a second or two, then let go of Alisa’s hand.
It dropped to the bed.
Minutes later, in a small conference room, Flatow sipped a bottle of orange soda and officially learned from a hospital surgeon what he already suspected.
Alisa was brain-dead.
The room fell silent. Thirty seconds passed. Then the surgeon said, “We have a question for you.”
Flatow sensed what the doctor was about to say.
“You want her organs for donation, don’t you?” Flatow said.
The doctor nodded. “Yes,” the doctor said. “Would you help?”
Flatow phoned Roslyn. Then he called two rabbis for advice, one of whom was a pediatric neurologist.
Then he agreed that surgeons at the hospital could remove Alisa’s organs. First, however, Flatow asked if he could see his daughter one last time.
He walked back to Alisa’s bedside. Flatow had not slept in more than twenty-five hours but he wanted time alone with Alisa.
He sat on the bed, listening to the ventilator, then whispered again to her.
“Wake up now,” he said. “Show them that they are wrong.”
Alisa did not move.
Flatow sat in silence studying his daughter’s face. After an hour, he got up and walked into another room, where he signed the papers to donate Alisa’s heart, lungs, kidneys, and other major organs to needy patients in Israel.
The embassy staffers drove him to the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv. An hour after he settled into his room, the phone rang.
President Bill Clinton was on the line.
“Mister Flatow,” the president began. “My wife and I were sitting here this morning talking. We don’t know if we could handle it the way you are handling it if something happened to our daughter. You are a brave man.”
“Mister President,” Flatow said. “You’d do anything for your daughter, correct?”
“Yes,” Clinton said.
“Just because my daughter isn’t with me doesn’t mean I stop being her father,” Flatow said.
“God bless you,” Clinton said.
Flatow thanked the president, then hung up.
A year passed.
Then two more months.
It was now June 1996. Sara Duker and Matthew Eisenfeld had been killed. Congress had passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and Clinton had signed it into law during a White House ceremony that Flatow had skipped.
Flatow spoke briefly to Clinton again—when the president visited with the Duker and Flatow families before a speech he gave at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey before heading to an antiterror conference in Egypt. The conference had been hastily arranged in the wake of a wave of bombings, one of which had killed Sara and Matt. Flatow wanted no part of politics. But in their meeting at Fairleigh Dickinson, Flatow urged Clinton to pressure Yasser Arafat to crack down on Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Clinton nodded and Flatow remembers him saying that Arafat was a key factor in curtailing terrorism. But Flatow did not believe that any special effort would be made in the near future to hold terrorists accountable, even those who murdered Alisa.
Flatow knew that the new law that Clinton signed contained a special clause that gave permission for victims of terrorism and their families to file lawsuits. Flatow was disheartened, though. The possibility of filing a lawsuit seemed remote—at best.
Then, several weeks later, the phone rang.
A rabbi in New York who had been involved in the campaign to crack down on Palestinian terrorism wanted Flatow to meet an attorney who might be interested in taking his case to court.
Flatow a
sked who the attorney was. The rabbi mentioned a name—Steven Perles.
Flatow had never heard of him.
The rabbi explained that Perles had played a key role in winning a judgment in a long-disputed war reparations case on behalf of Hugo Princz, a Jewish-American citizen in Europe who was imprisoned as a teenager by the Nazis during World War II and was now living in Highland Park, New Jersey. Flatow had never met Princz, but certainly knew his story, which had become a cause célèbre within New Jersey’s tight-knit Jewish community.
Princz was born in Czechoslovakia in 1922. His mother was a Czech-born Jew. But his father who was also Jewish, had been born in the United States and was an American citizen. This meant that Hugo Princz was automatically considered to be a US citizen too, even though the family continued to live in Czechoslovakia.
By the time World War II erupted, Princz’s father, Herman, had established a successful business that leased harvesting equipment to Czech farmers. Herman and his wife, Gisella, who had become a US citizen, now had a daughter and two other sons besides seventeen-year-old Hugo, and elected to stay in Czechoslovakia even though they had heard that Jews in other countries invaded by the Nazis had lost their homes and were being shipped off to concentration camps. The United States had not entered the war yet and Herman and Gisella figured their US citizenships would give their family a neutral, protected status. They were wrong.
By December 1941, the United States had declared war on Germany, which had annexed Czechoslovakia and begun to implement the same anti-Jewish policies that the Princzes had heard about in Europe’s other occupied countries. Without warning, in March 1942, Herman, Gisella, and their children were arrested by Slovak police. The police then turned the Princz family over to the Nazi SS.
Each member of the Princz family had an American passport. But Czechoslovakia’s Nazi government refused to allow the family to return to the United States as part of a civilian citizen exchange that had been supervised by the Red Cross. Instead, the Princzes were dispatched to a series of concentration camps with other Jews.
Herman, Gisella, and their daughter were sent to the Treblinka death camp where they died, according to court records. Hugo Princz and two younger brothers ended up at Auschwitz, then were assigned to the Birkenau camp where they were forced to work at a nearby I.G. Farben chemical plant as slave laborers. Princz’s brothers were injured on the job, removed from their work gangs, and starved to death. Princz managed to live.
After laboring as a bricklayer at I.G. Farben, he was forced to work at a factory that built Messerschmitt fighters and bombers for the German Luftwaffe. By the spring of 1945, as US forces neared, Princz was forced to board a freight car jammed with other prisoners and sent to another concentration camp to be killed. But American soldiers stopped the train. Noticing the “USA” that the Nazis had stitched on his camp uniform, the soldiers pulled Princz out of the group of other prisoners and sent him to an American military hospital for treatment.
For the first time in three years, Princz was not only a free man but he was officially recognized as an American citizen. After recovering in the hospital, he moved to New Jersey, got married, and eventually settled into a job as a butcher at a supermarket. He was the only member of his family to survive the war.
In 1955, Princz applied for compensation as part of a postwar reparations agreement in which the new Federal Republic of Germany—then known as West Germany—offered monthly financial payments to Holocaust survivors. But Princz’s application was turned down. The West German government determined that Princz was neither a German citizen at the time of his arrest, nor a refugee as defined by the Geneva Convention after World War II. A court later determined that Princz might have qualified for reparations when the German government changed its eligibility rules in 1965. But Princz missed the deadline to apply before the statute of limitations for war reparations expired in 1969.
Another fifteen years passed. By 1984, Princz embarked on a new strategy to draw attention to his story.
With the help of US Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Princz convinced the US State Department to send a series of requests to the German government and to the US subsidiaries of I.G. Farben, which included BASF and Bayer, to pay some sort of financial reparation to him or to establish a pension fund.
Once again, every request was denied, along with additional overtures from officials in the Bush and Clinton administrations—including even a personal attempt by President Clinton to convince German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to settle the matter on basic moral grounds.
Frustrated and running out of options, Princz decided to find a lawyer. One evening, while attending a large banquet, he happened to be seated at a table with a New Jersey bank president and his wife.
When the banker’s wife heard that Princz had been at Auchwitz, she mentioned that she, too, was a Holocaust survivor. But rather than being confined to a concentration camp, she said that she had been hidden throughout the war by a Christian family and spent much of her time confined to small hiding places, including a space under a farmer’s haystack.
As the woman finished her story, she mentioned that she had applied to the German government for a war reparation as a Holocaust survivor and was receiving more than $1,000 a month. She then turned to Princz and asked what amount of financial restitution he was receiving.
Slowly, Princz began to tell his story to the woman and her husband—how his entire family had been lost, how he had worked as a slave laborer, and how his application for war reparations had been denied on a technicality about his citizenship and refugee status, then denied again because he missed a filing deadline.
As Princz finished, the woman’s husband mentioned that he had just won a multimillion-dollar judgment in a bank fraud case in Costa Rica. It had been a complicated case, he said. But he had managed to find a lawyer in Washington, DC, who knew how to navigate the nuances of international law and politics, then find the most persuasive legal threads to help stitch together a successful case.
The banker mentioned a name: Steven Perles.
Perles was born on the first day of summer in 1951 in Boston. But after graduating law school at the Virginia’s College of William and Mary in 1975, he became a fixture in Washington.
Initially, Perles’s legal expertise was not focused on courtrooms or even in legal briefs. For six years after law school, he helped to shape and shepherd legislation through Congress as a legal counsel and legislative aide to Alaska’s powerful Republican senator, Ted Stevens. How the outspoken Alaskan senator and the bookish young lawyer from Boston connected was a bit of an accident. In law school, Perles had developed an interest in environmental law. In the mid-1970s, as federal clean-air regulations were just beginning to be written, Alaska had several unique problems. One of the most notable was the way the state’s severe weather patterns tended to affect air pollution, which perhaps would violate the new, national regulations. Perles wrote a law school research paper on Alaska’s dilemma. Stevens read the paper and hired Perles for his staff.
After six years on Capitol Hill, Perles was ready to strike out on his own. He was just turning thirty, and he wanted to establish a law practice that specialized in international law. For the next six years, Perles handled a wide variety of cases, including one that reached the US Supreme Court involving Japanese whaling firms.
Perles had never had a client like Hugo Princz, though. After Princz left a message at Perles’s Washington office, Perles waited several days to return the call. It wasn’t that Perles was avoiding the case. Perles’s wife was giving birth to their first child, a son. After his wife and newborn boy were resting comfortably, Perles found a hospital pay phone and dialed Princz’s number.
The Princz case was steeped in politics. Perles knew that. He also knew that Princz had a strong moral anchor to his case—namely, that he was a Holocaust victim and had been denied just compensation because of a tech
nicality. But Perles sensed that simply having moral righteousness on your side was not always enough to win a satisfactory judgment. Sometimes you needed to play a strong political hand, especially if the case involved international law.
As he listened to Princz’s story of his last application being rejected by German authorities because he missed a deadline for filing, Perles remembered a lesson he learned several years earlier while working with Ted Stevens on similarly frustrating issues with foreign governments. “Most of these governments do what is in their perceived national interest, whether we think it’s right or wrong,” Perles said. “My job is to create an environment, either by carrot or stick, where they believe that what I want them to do is in their perceived national interest.”
So began almost seven more years of political lobbying, culminating in a landmark federal lawsuit in which Princz filed suit against the German government for a series of charges that hardly seemed connected to something as momentous as the Holocaust. Princz’s suit accused Germany of false imprisonment, assault and battery, negligent and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and a failure to pay proper wages for work at the I.G. Farben and Messerschmitt plants.
The case may have emerged from a complicated story of citizenship and Nazi war atrocities. But Perles turned it into a straightforward argument over the kinds of basic legal issues that are dealt with on a daily basis in almost any court in the United States.
Not surprisingly, Princz—and Perles—won the first round of their lawsuit in US district court. But they lost when Germany took the case to a US federal appeals court, claiming that it was protected by America’s Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. The Act listed specific instances in which US citizens could file legal claims against a foreign government—and false imprisonment, assault, battery, emotional distress and a lack of proper payment for work did not qualify, according to the appellate judges.
By now, Princz and Perles had also drawn the attention of lawyers for the US State Department, who argued that American citizens should not be given wide permission to file lawsuits—and to collect damages—from foreign governments. The State Department lawyers feared drastic repercussions if such suits were allowed to multiply.