By CARDINAL JOHN J. O'CONNOR

"Helvetia unter Druck" says the headline: "Switzerland Under Pressure." That Switzerland is under pressure is hardly news. The shocking revelations concerning dormant bank accounts and looted assets of Holocaust victims have cost Swiss banks a great deal in lost respect. This particular headline, however, captions a cartoon depicting a caricature of a Jew turning the screws of a press which is squeezing a personified Switzerland to cough up its treasures.

So again the victim is portrayed as the victimizer. When will the Holocaust really end? The Office of New York City Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi publishes an exceedingly informative report, "Swiss Monitor: An Update on Switzerland's Progress in Making Restitution to Holocaust Survivors." The August 1997 issue quotes a Swiss bank executive who called the banking scandal a war, having to do with a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world's "prestige financial markets." (New Yorker, April 28/May 5, 1997.) Presumably the same executive would advise us that the giant swastika recently cut into a cornfield near Princeton, N. J., as pictured

and reported in the New York Post of July 13, 1998, is a plot of Jews to destabilize the international market on corn.

Despite the anti-Semitic ugliness, however, Mr. Hevesi and others report hopefully about settlement negotiations under way. Moreover, they are careful to praise those Swiss banks which are engaging in serious discussions of settlement issues, including restitution to victims and survivors. The question now, as I understand it, is whether the Swiss government will consistently throw itself actively into assuring that these discussions will be successful and will be followed by constructive action.

It may indeed be impossible for the family of humanity ever to compensate fully for the Holocaust, but all the more reason why we have to seize every opportunity to try to restore the balance, even if fractionally. It is not only an imperative of justice for victims and survivors; it is essential to the full restoration of humanity to the human race! Even those who could validly plead ignorance of the Holocaust or who had nothing to do with it were violated by it, demeaned, lessened as persons.

John Donne's words plead as poignantly today as ever: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

In other words, this is not to be dismissed by the anti-Semitic as "merely" a Jewish issue, nor is it merely a Swiss issue; it is a human rights issue, an issue of the human race. An entire people suffered the torture of the damned during the Holocaust precisely because they were a people. Now a relative handful of survivors together with some heirs are trying to recover what will never compensate for past horrors, but which can at least make the future more livable, despite the memories. From time to time in this column I have pleaded for American concern for Christians and others in China, the Sudan and elsewhere persecuted for their religion. I am a Christian, but that is not the issue. The New York Times' Jewish Abe Rosenthal has pleaded even more frequently than I for our country to take steps to end the persecution. He rightly sees it as an issue of human rights, an issue of the human race.

The campaign for justice for Holocaust victims and survivors vis-a-vis the Swiss banks is making progress. If we permit it to wither away or to be deliberately checkmated, all humanity will be further diminished. That is no mere abstraction. Dehumanization is inevitably the price we pay for indifference to matters of life and death.