In broader policy terms, the determination of relatively well-placed heirs such as Gold to pursue their personal property claims appears to be helping rather than hindering elderly survivors of the concentration and death camps and their families. Following the betrayal of the former slave labourers by Jewish organisations in the negotiations with the German authorities in the 1990s, Germany and countries in Eastern Europe have not achieved the “legal peace” they desired.

Poland is rightly under pressure to compensate Jewish heirs for properties lost under the Nazis. The Polish legislature has been reluctant to accommodate the property claims of Jewish families whose members no longer live in Poland regardless of the reality that, in most cases where Jews were not murdered, they were expelled. A recent case before the US courts has opened the way for similar property claims in Hungary.

Moreover, Gold’s campaign has been making waves at the University of Mannheim. She discovered that the Victoria Insurance Company, which benefited from the foreclosure on her family property in 1936, had funded a foundation there in the name of its then chairman. Her appeal to the university to end its practice of honouring an aryaniser remains in progress. It is significant, however, that the university appears to be taking its moral responsibilities more seriously than Oxford and Cambridge, which still refuse to dissociate themselves from the highly dubious Alfred Toepfer Foundation.

It is obviously tempting for many in public positions to prefer setting up Holocaust monuments and museums to grasping the nettle of securing justice for individual survivors and their descendants. Admittedly, the search for compensation can provide rich pickings for entrepreneurial lawyers. Moreover, there is the argument that, by continuing to press for even basic compensation or restitution, survivors and their families risk sparking anti-Semitism, while also provoking parallel claims by dispossessed Palestinians. None of these are valid arguments. Many elderly Holocaust victims remain in poverty. Statues, memorials and days of remembrance are no substitute for basic justice and balanced history.