France pays Holocaust families for train exodus

Forty-nine 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 after 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 with just 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 Holocaust reparations agreement was unique, said former ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, the State Department’s expert adviser on Holocaustera issues, 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 heirs will receive a portion of a deportee and spouse’s payments, depending on when they died.

The State Department approved 386 claims, 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.

The total payments will end up being almost double what many recipients initially were paid during the first round in the summer of 2016, when about $30 million was paid out. State Department officials said they had made “conservative” payments as quickly as possible because so many of the survivors and their spouses were elderly. The department is now making a second round of payments to those recipients, as well as to applicants who filed successful claims later.

Letters to the recipients announcing the second round of payments were mailed this week.