France set to expand Holocaust reparations
U.S. survivors, heirs say justice overdue for train deportations
WASHINGTON — Francine Cohen was only a toddler in France when her Jewish mother was put on a government-owned train to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
She never saw her mother again.
For Cohen, now a 76-year-old retiree who lives in Los Angeles, the French government’s agreement to pay $60 million in reparations to American, Israeli, Canadian and other Holocaust survivors and their families for the infamous French deportations is long overdue.
“To tell you the truth, it’s not going to bring back our relatives,” Cohen said Wednesday. “But we always felt that the French trains were so responsible for all those people they took to the camps that they have to pay for it.”
The State Department began accepting applications Tuesday from survivors, their spouses and their heirs for compensation for the French use of its government-owned railroad under inhumane conditions to deport tens of thousands of Jews and others to death camps during World War II.
About 100 non-French survivors could receive more than $100,000 each, according to Stuart Eizenstat, a Washington lawyer and former diplomat who negotiated the agreement as a special State Department adviser on Holocaust issues.
He said spouses of deceased survivors could receive tens of thousands of dollars. Children and other heirs of survivors or their spouses could also be eligible, based on how long the survivor or spouse lived after the war, which ended 70 years ago.
“The agreement is another measure of justice to help those who suffered for the harms of one of history’s darkest eras,” Eizenstat said.
He said it was the first time a World War II ally had agreed to pay reparations to U.S. citizens for Holocaust-related crimes, and the deal is unusual because it includes survivors’ heirs and estates. The reparations will be paid by the French government, not the railroad.
Several thousand applications are expected in all. Claims are due by May 31 at www.state.gov/deportationclaims.
In exchange, the U.S. government agreed to ensure an end to American lawsuits against France for the deportations.
France began paying compensation to French survivors of the deportations in 1948 and subsequently agreed to pay reparations to survivors in Belgium, Poland, Britain and the former Czechoslovakia.
Historians say SNCF, or Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais, transported 76,000 Jews and others to Auschwitz and other concentration camps in stifling cattle cars and boxcars during the Nazi occupation. All but 2,000 died along the way or were killed in the camps.
For 94-year-old Alain Rogier, who lives in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles and was deported to Auschwitz on the French railroad, the reparations would be a boon in his old age, said his daughter, Veronique Rogier Zoltan.
“He will be pleased. For him at this time it would really help a lot,” she said. “I think it’s long overdue.”