60-year fight with insurer nears a truce

[Herman Munster]

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/16455490.htm

Before his death at age 90, Paul Weiss revealed a story that to this day still angers his son.

A giant Italian insurance company in 1945 had refused to make good on a $50,000 life insurance policy the elder Weiss had purchased in Czechoslovakia before the start of World War II.

The rejection came months after he was set free from Nazi concentration camps, where Weiss' first wife and three children were executed in gas chambers.

''They threw him out,'' said Dr. Thomas Weiss, 57, who was born in Prague and moved to Miami Beach with his parents, both Holocaust survivors, after the war.

Now Assicurazioni Generali, the Trieste-based company, has agreed to settle unpaid life insurance policy claims with thousands of Holocaust survivors and their heirs. But after decades of demanding justice, Weiss, an ophthalmologist, doesn't want any part of Generali's payout because he sees it as a ``sham.''

The company, founded two centuries ago, says the settlement deal is ``fair.''

[Warpy]

1. A judge needs to step in and index it to inflation

and perhaps that would get through to them that welshing on a policy is bad juju.

[Selah]

2. Uh huh