Holocaust survivors receive reparations for deportations
France issued payments for concentration camp trains
More than seven decades after World War II ended, 49 Holocaust survivors are receiving $402,000 each from the French government in reparations for the French trains that deported them to Nazi concentration camps, the State Department said Wednesday.
Thirty-two surviving spouses of deportees who died following the war will receive up to $100,500 each, officials said.
The payments fall under a 2014 U.S.France agreement in which the French government offered $60 million in reparations for Holocaust deportations. In exchange, the U.S. government asked courts to dismiss any lawsuits against the French railway, known as SNCF, and the French government.
The agreement came after U.S. Holocaust survivors who had been transported to Nazi camps on French trains - usually without no food and a bucket for a toilet - objected when a company affiliated with the French railway began bidding on lucrative U.S. rail contracts. The State Department decided which claims merited payment under the agreement.
“This is a really important moment, a very satisfying moment and the end of a painstaking process to help those who were long denied justice,” said former ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, the State Department’s expert adviser on Holocaust-era issues.
Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, said reparations are “important for the historical record” and to hold governments and companies accountable for their roles in the Holocaust.
“Holocaust compensation is never about the money,” said Schneider, whose nonprofit group negotiates for reparations. “It’s about acknowledgment. It’s about recognition. It’s about justice . . . . Is there any amount of money that could compensate you for even one day in Auschwitz, a factory of death and murder?”
The French Holocaust reparations agreement was unique, Eizenstat said, because it included compensation for the heirs, including children and grandchildren.