Holocaust survivors get payments in French deportations

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 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, of both deportees and their spouses. The heirs were viewed as “standing in the shoes” of those who had died before the agreement was signed, he said.

The State Department approved 386 of the 867 claims filed, officials said. The agreement covered U.S. citizens, as well as deportees who settled in other countries after the war. It did not cover citizens of France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Poland and the former Czechoslovakia because those countries have their own reparations programs, Eizenstat said.

Most who are receiving payments are Americans or Israelis, officials said, but they include survivors, spouses and heirs from Canada, Mexico, Peru and other countries. They also include eight to 10 U.S. and Canadian airmen who were deported after being shot down over France, officials said.

The total payments will end up being almost double what many recipients initially received during the first round in the summer of 2016, when about $30 million was paid out.