Christoph Meili has paid a high price for doing the right thing.
A former Swiss bank guard who saved crucial Holocaust-era bank documents from being shredded, Meili was the target of hate mail and death threats in his home country. He lost his bank job. Though he’s not Jewish, he was accused of being part of a Jewish conspiracy and labeled a traitor. The Swiss press demonized him, calling him a gang member and a drug addict.
Today he, his wife and two young children are facing the overwhelming task of rebuilding their lives in a new land. After being granted political asylum in this country — the only Swiss nationals ever to be given that status — they reside in New Jersey.
Currently, Meili is unemployed. He is working hard to learn English so he can begin attending college at Southern California’s Chapman University in the fall. The 1939 Club, a Los Angeles-area group of Holocaust survivors and their families, will cover his tuition and help with living expenses.
“The survivors have sympathy for me,” he said last week over a cup of coffee at the San Francisco International Airport. “I’m a refugee;s I have to start over. They can imagine how this is.”
Meili, 30, visited the Bay Area last week to speak at a Silicon Valley fund-raiser for the American Friends of Ben-Gurion University. The lanky young man with spiked hair stumbled into history and possibly helped change its course.
Meili came upon two large bins of documents headed for the shredder while making rounds at the Union Bank of Switzerland in January 1997. At first, he turned the other way.
“I knew it smelled like trouble and I don’t like trouble,” he said.
He came back moments later and was shocked to find records related to bank accounts and other assets belonging to European Jews, many of whom had perished in the Holocaust.
“It was clear this stuff belonged to Jewish people,” he said. “I knew what I had to do.”
Meili had seen the movie “Schindler’s List” just weeks before and had been inspired by the main character, a German businessman who employed Jews in his factory to save them from death.
“He saw something and began to do something,” Meili said.
So Meili rolled up a series of documents and tucked them into his shirt. The next day, he went back and took two books, hiding them under his large winter coat.
Sneaking the documents out, he was nervous, though he knew he was unlikely to get caught. Security at the bank at that time was far from airtight, he said. “It was like Swiss cheese. There were many holes.”
He turned the papers over to a Jewish organization in Zurich. While he was hailed as a hero by Jews around the world, Meili’s own countrymen viewed him differently.
Blaming him for harming Switzerland’s reputation, they questioned his motives. The bank director publicly suggested Meili may have been paid off by Israel’s secret service.
“I was really shocked,” the former guard said. “They were blaming everything on me.”
Then came bomb threats and a threat that his young daughter and son would be kidnapped and “held for ransom for the money I’d be getting from the Jews.”
After denying that the records rescued by Meili were Holocaust related, Switzerland’s largest bank finally admitted the records came from the Nazi era.
Hundreds of pounds of documents had been shredded before Meili intervened, the bank said. But bank officials maintained those documents were unrelated to the ongoing search for Jewish assets deposited in Swiss banks in the World War II period.
During the summer, Switzerland agreed to a $1.25 billion settlement over its Holocaust-era bank accounts. Meili believes strongly that survivors, and not the organized Jewish community, should play the key role in determining how the funds will be distributed.
Raised Protestant, Meili had little contact with Jews before becoming embroiled in the bank scandal. In fact, it was not until arriving in this country that he had a chance to speak to Holocaust survivors.
“They say, ‘If there were more people like you, the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened,'” Meili said.
Still, he doesn’t consider himself a hero. “I’m a regular person,” he said. “I don’t know what a hero is.”
In some ways, Meili is still digesting the aftereffects of the decision he made on that winter night in 1997. For now, he is focused on preparing for school, though he does not yet know what he wants to study. He also does not know whether he will return to Switzerland one day.
“It’s hard,” he said. “I miss it sometimes.”