THE BLAME GAME; AS SWITZERLAND COMES UNDER MOUNTING SCRUTINY FOR FAILING TO ACCOUNT FOR MONEY BELONGING TO HOLOCAUST VICTIMS, LET US NOT FORGET SWEDEN, PORTUGAL, SPAIN AND EVEN . . . THE U.S.

Byline: Si Frumkin

I visited Switzerland twice. The first time was in 1947. I was a 16-year old Holocaust survivor, an ignorant kid without a country, without a respectable passport, without money.

The Swiss let me come in because the organization ORT was willing to pay for me to go to school and try to catch up on the education I missed during the war. (Before the Russian revolution, one of my uncles was a co-founder of ORT so when the organization learned that I was alive they decided to help me, but that's another story.)

The Swiss tolerated my presence, but just barely. I had to report to the police every three months, I had to register wherever I went, and no one was especially sympathetic. I didn't miss Switzerland or the Swiss when I left after six months or so.

Many years later, when I went back to Switzerland to go skiing as an American with dollars in my pockets, I understood why so many people raved about how wonderful the Swiss were and what a great country it was. Being a rich - or anyway semi-rich - American in Switzerland was quite different from being a stateless poor person.

Everyone smiled a lot, couldn't do enough for me, they were polite and caring, there were no problems with cops or bureaucrats. It was an altogether different country from the one I visited the first time around.

You can gather by now that I am not a wild-eyed fan of Switzerland and the Swiss. Still, I think that the Swiss are being unfairly singled out by the media as the villains in the matter of Swiss banks, Nazi gold, stolen and hidden Jewish bank accounts and all the rest.

It isn't that all of the accusations are not true and well-deserved, far from it. What puzzles me is the apparent concentration of attention on the Swiss to the exclusion of all those other countries that have done the same things that the Swiss have, and which are not receiving even a fraction of the attention the Swiss are.

Switzerland was not the only neutral European country that traded with the Nazis, permitted transfer of strategic materials, or excluded Jewish refugees fleeing for their lives.

It is true that the Swiss asked the German government to stamp the passports of German Jews with a large ``J'' so they could be recognized and stopped at the border and that they allowed transports of wounded German soldiers to transit Switzerland on the way to Germany, but Sweden was just as adamant in excluding Jewish refugees - they made an exception for the ``Scandinavian'' Danish Jews but not for Eastern Europeans.

Sweden supplied Germany with steel and ball bearings. Spain transshipped oil and strategic materials to Germany and had a division fighting for Germany on the Eastern front. Turkey and Portugal cooperated with Hitler in every way they could.

And every single European country in addition to Switzerland - Sweden, Turkey and Portugal - did exactly what Switzerland did when it came to Nazi gold and Jewish bank accounts and investments: They accepted and laundered gold regardless of its source and they appropriated and refused to return millions in Jewish deposits and property.

In 1946, the Allies demanded that Switzerland return $58 million as settlement in full for the approximately $400 million it had received from Germany.

But Portugal was told at the same time to return $51 million - almost as much as the Swiss - and returned only $4 million so far without anyone criticizing it.

Spain is estimated to have received about $30 million and returned about $100,000, Turkey got about $5 million and kept it all, and we don't really know anything about Sweden, a neutral country and a major trading partner of Germany. And don't forget, in 1945-1947 an ounce of gold cost about $30 - today it is close to $400, so all these numbers have to be multiplied by at least 10.

Oh yes, the Western Allies - the U.S., Great Britain and France - still hold about $70 million in Nazi gold - about five tons of it. It is supposed to be disposed of by the end of 1998, but I haven't seen anything in the press about distribution of this gold by these ``good guy'' governments to those who were persecuted and robbed by the Nazis, have you?

Millions were deposited by Jews in the banks of neutral countries, including, of course, Switzerland. Sweden probably profited almost as much as the Swiss from deposits by Jews who trusted the solid, honest Scandinavian banks to guard their money. There was probably less money deposited in Spain or Turkey or Portugal, maybe not hundreds of millions, but surely tens of millions.

I am puzzled. I welcome the attention the Swiss are getting, but isn't it only fair to start stressing that they are not the only ones whose hands are dirty?