SITTING in her book-lined Budapest flat, Katalin Soltesz holds up a 60-year-old sheet of yellowing typewritten paper. The document is all that remains of her family heirlooms after her father Jozsef, a Jewish dentist, was forced to surrender them to a Hungarian bank for “safekeeping” on April 29, 1944.

Dr Soltesz was six when she and her parents were sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp later that year. The carefully itemised receipt lists her father’s modest valuables: a gold pocket watch, his officer’s uniform gold dress chain, his wife Rozsa’s watch, pearl earrings, and matching necklace.

The valuables of all 147 Jewish families in Torokszentmiklos, eastern Hungary, were sent to Budapest to be sorted and loaded on to the notorious “Hungarian Gold Train”. But the train was itself looted — not by Nazis, but by American army officers when they found it in Austria in May 1945.

After a three-year legal battle, the US Government has finally agreed to make amends for that looting. The exact terms have yet to be finalised, but a $25 million (£13 million) compensation fund will assist needy Hungarian Holocaust survivors. There are no plans, however, to compensate for individual losses and Jozsef Soltesz’ s valuables are gone for ever.

Dr Soltesz, 66, told The Times: “I don’t think we can ever get my parents’ possessions back. We would like some kind of compensation, but the recognition of what happened to our family is very important and that is also a kind of justice. But I’m very sorry it is only happening now, because so many people have died.”

In the decades since 1945, the Hungarian Gold Train has gained an almost mythic status. The train, more than 40 carriages long, was packed with the wealth and personal property of Hungarian Jews, 500,000 of whom perished in the Holocaust. The goods were packed into 1,560 cases, each carefully recorded and classified. The contents, worth tens of millions of pounds, included watches, jewellery, precious stones, antiques, cameras, chinaware, typewriters, adding machines, 17 bundles of walking sticks with silver handles, clocks, and more than 2,700 carpets.

The train was discovered by Allied troops near Salzburg in 1945. It came under joint US and French control and its contents were wrongly classified as enemy property so, after the war, the US Government refused to return the goods. The valuables under French control were eventually returned, but those under US jurisdiction were either auctioned, with some of the proceeds given to Jewish charities, or looted by senior US army officers, who helped themselves to silverware, jewellery and luxury carpets which they used in their billets and offices.

Surrendering his valuables to the Nazis brought no protection for Jozsef Soltesz. The family were deported to a holding camp in Szolnok and held in a sugar factory.

“The factory in Szolnok was the most terrible place,” Dr Soltesz said. “We were held there for eight days while the Hungarian Arrow Cross Nazis tortured people to find out where their valuables were hidden.” From Szolnok, the family were sent to Austria where they worked as labourers before being sent to Bergen-Belsen.

The family were eventually liberated by American troops. They returned to Torokszentmiklos to find their home had been stripped clean. Years later, Dr Soltesz was contacted by the daughter of Gyula Berta, the bank manager who had issued her father with the receipt. It had been found among his personal papers after his death.

The Gold Train lawsuit has been an embarrassment to the US Government. In the past few years Washington has been a driving force behind settlements reached with Swiss banks over dormant Holocaust-era bank accounts, and it has put pressure on German industry to compensate Holocaust-era slave labourers.

But Washington’s stand was weakened after the US Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets identified several US generals who took valuables from the Gold Train, and described the Army’s behaviour as “an egregious failure of the US to follow its own policy regarding restitution of Holocaust victims’ property after World War II”.

The Hungarian Gold Train symbolises the triple victimisation of Hungarian Jewry, the historian Dr Gabor Kadar, co-author of the Hungarian Holocaust study Self-Financing Genocide, has said.

“Firstly they were robbed by their own government, then the US refused to return the contents of the Gold Train, and finally the part of the train’s contents that was returned by the French was simply stolen by the Communists,” he said.

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