Holocaust reparation talks weigh on French firm’s U.S. rail bid
WASHINGTON — The French government has begun negotiating with the State Department over paying reparations to U.S. Holocaust survivors who were deported to Nazi death camps in French trains — a decades-old controversy now surrounding a French company bidding on a $2.2 billion light-rail project in Maryland.
Stuart Eizenstat, a Washington lawyer serving as special advisor to Secretary of State John Kerry on Holocaust issues, confirmed Thursday that he and several State Department officials met with French officials Feb. 6 in Paris, an extension of informal discussions over the past year.
“To the great credit of the French, they came to us and said they’d recognized there were ‘holes in the blanket’ of their [Holocaust reparations] program that didn’t cover Americans” who were deported on French trains during World War II, he said. Eizenstat negotiated similar compensation agreements between the United States and Germany, Switzerland and Austria during the Clin- ton administration. The question of how much the government-owned French railway owes to U.S. Holocaust survivors has come to a head in Maryland. Legislation introduced Jan. 31 in the state’s General Assembly would block a subsidiary of the French railway from winning a contract for the proposed 16-mile Purple Line in southern Maryland until the railway compensates U.S. victims. If approved, it would be the first state law to ban companies with Holocaust ties from receiving U.S. government contracts until reparations are paid. The rail company subsidiary, Keolis, has already won more than $2 billion in U.S. contracts.
Historians say Keolis’ parent company, known as SNCF — Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Franais — transported 76,000 Jews and other prisoners to Nazi death camps in packed, stifling cattle cars. All but about 2,000 were killed. The push for European governments and companies with ties to the Nazis to compensate Holocaust victims in the United States has been underway since the 1990s.
The French government says it has paid more than $6 billion in reparations to survivors, including to people deported on SNCF trains and to their surviving spouses. But those payments, which began in 1948, cover only French citizens and deportees who ended up in the countries that reached bilateral agreements with France: Poland, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom and Belgium, a U.S. official said.
The United States didn’t reach such an agreement for Holocaust deportees who ended up living here, leaving them ineligible for the payments.
The focus on SNCF has intensified in recent years as the French railway and Keolis have sought lucrative rail contracts in the United States, including for highspeed systems proposed in California and Florida.
Keolis and SNCF came under criticism in Northern Virginia in 2010 after Virgin- ia Railway Express awarded Keolis its first U.S. contract, an $85 million agreement to operate and maintain its commuter trains over five years. Keolis’ only other U.S. rail contract is a $2.68 billion contract it won in January to operate the Massachusetts commuter rail system for eight years. SNCF has no U.S. rail contracts, company officials have said.
Leo Bretholz, a 92-yearold Holocaust survivor who lives in the Baltimore County community of Pikesville, Md. and escaped from an SNCF train in 1942 before it reached Auschwitz, said he doesn’t want any of his Maryland tax money going to SNCF or a subsidiary, even if SNCF pays reparations.
Bretholz said he would donate any SNCF payments he received to charity. Even so, he said, the railway must take financial responsibility for the prisoners it carried.
“It’s important for one reason: Justice should be done,” Bretholz said. “When they [pay reparations], they admit they did something wrong — terribly wrong — sending people to be murdered.”