TIRED OF SILENCE; VICTIMS OF HOLOCAUST WANT INSURERS TO PAY UP.

Byline: David Bloom Daily News Staff Writer

One day in November 1944, Nazi soldiers marched Max Solti and about 100 other Jewish men from a forced-labor battalion into the woods near a village in Hungary, and shot them dead.

For more than 50 years, Solti's widow and his son fought a lonely battle for a small measure of justice. They wrote and wrote and wrote to an Italian insurance company, demanding that it pay off on a $1,000 policy Solti took out in 1929 to protect his young family if any harm befell him.

``All I ever got was silence,'' said Max Solti's son, Ivan. ``It's been a thorn in my side all these years.''

The 67-year-old Encino resident is part of a federal class-action lawsuit filed recently in New York against 20 of Europe's largest insurers who have not paid off on policies sold to Jews who died in the Holocaust. Lawyers bringing the case estimate there are several thousand Holocaust relatives and survivors who might be eligible for insurance payoffs.

On Monday, Ivan Solti and others took their case to the public at a hearing conducted by California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush, who believes they are owed billions of dollars in unpaid benefits, interest and punitive damages. Max Solti's $1,000 policy would be worth as much as $100,000, his son said.

``It is a shock to me that in all these years, all these claims have not been resolved,'' Quackenbush said. ``It is stunning to me that people who have suffered continue to suffer because of the indifference of companies and the indifference of governments.''

Quackenbush's office is working with other state insurance commissioners to force the companies to pay up.

He said investigators have found that companies marketed policies to Jews in occupied areas knowing they would soon be carted off to die in concentration camps. The policies were then signed over and paid out to the Nazi government.

The thousands of Jewish businesses damaged by Nazi Brownshirts in the 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht were never repaid either, said attorney Edward Fagan, whose firm is bringing the case on a pro bono basis.

And many people were denied benefits from life insurance policies for failing to provide a death certificate, which the Nazis generally didn't create for the Jews they killed, Fagan said.

In some cases, the insurance companies were intimately involved with the Nazis. One was Allianz AG, whose subsidiaries include Fireman's Fund Insurance. In 1933, Allianz's chairman became the Nazis' first minister of the economy. Later, the company refused to pay off property insurance for Jewish businesses damaged in the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938.

Documents found recently in German archives show the company stopped insuring Jewish homes soon after ``because they burn down too often.''

Max Solti's family fared slightly better. After he was slain, the family was shipped first to an Austrian forced-labor camp and then to a Czech concentration camp. They survived the camps and the subsequent Communist takeover of their homeland and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution before finally immigrating to the United States.

But the upheavals of those years left the family destitute, with none of their belongings, property or other resources. And that policy Max Solti signed to care for his family was never paid off.

For years, his widow wrote to Assicurazioni Generali, as the company is known now, seeking payment on the policy. Then when she died in 1965, Ivan Solti began writing.

``(My father) wanted to protect his heirs and we had nothing left,'' he said. ``And here's an insurance company that's one of the largest in the world and it can't come clean and pay up.''

Generali and Allianz each have started a hotline for people who think they have a claim. And they have opened up their archives to allow further review.

Allianz hired the Arthur Andersen consulting firm to review 1.3 million prewar policies, while Generali has created a policy information center.

Allianz hired a University of California, Berkeley, professor to document the company's dark history of Nazi involvement, work that should be complete in about a year, said company spokesman Christopher Worthley from Munich, Germany.

Generali, whose spokesman referred to a four-page statement submitted to Quackenbush, has created a $12 million fund in Israel to benefit Holocaust survivors.

The company said it was founded by Jewish merchants in 1831, founded the Migdal insurance company in Jewish Palestine in the 1930s and remains the biggest insurer in Israel.

Repayment has been muddied by a variety of issues, the insurance companies say. In some countries, records were lost or shielded for decades behind communism's Iron Curtain.

And the Communists nationalized insurance operations, costing the parent companies millions of dollars in assets and leaving them to claim they had no assets to pay off the benefits.

In other countries, reparations were paid from one government to the next, with nothing going to individuals who might have suffered losses.

Quackenbush said the issue is ``an extremely high priority.''

``We're not going to rest until the entire situation is rectified,'' Quackenbush said.

WHERE TO CALL FOR HELP

Although most people with outstanding claims on insurance policies for Holocaust victims do not have copies of policies or policy numbers, they should call anyway because insurance companies have records, regulators said.

For more information, call the California Department of Insurance consumer hotline at [phone]. For information on the class-action lawsuit brought by Holocaust victims, survivors and heirs, call the law firm of Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe, [phone] or BetTzedek Legal Services, [phone]. The Assicurazioni Generali maintains a toll-free hotline at [phone].

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos, box

PHOTO (1) Ivan Solti of Encino holds a copy of a Hungarian life insurance policy for his father, who was killed in the Holocaust. The insurer has not paid up.

David Sprague/Daily News

(2) Fred Jackson talks about his family's insurance claim during a hearing with Chuck Quackenbush.

Terri Thuente/Daily News

BOX: WHERE TO CALL FOR HELP (see text)