Thousands of Holocaust survivors and family members will be compensated from a $60 million French-US fund announced last week as reparation to those deported by France’s state-owned railway company SNCF during the Nazi occupation from 1940-44.
As part of the deal, the American government will work to end lawsuits and other compensation claims in US courts against SNCF, which is bidding for lucrative high-speed rail and other contracts American markets. State legislators in Maryland, New York, Florida and California have tried to punish SNCF for its Holocaust-era actions.
“This is another measure of justice for the harms of one of history’s darkest eras,” said the US Special Adviser on Holocaust Issues, Stuart Eizenstat, who spent three years working with French officials on the agreement.
SNCF transported about 76,000 French Jews to Nazi concentration camps, though experts disagree on its degree of guilt. The company has expressed regret for what happened, but argues it had no effective control over operations during the Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1944.
The compensation fund will be financed by the French government and managed by the United States. The accord will be signed Monday in Washington, but it still must get approval from the French Parliament, which could take months.
France’s government has already paid more than $6 billion in reparations, but only to French citizens and certain deportees. The new accord is to help compensate Americans, Israelis and some others who were not eligible for other French reparations programs.
Patrizianna Sparacino-Thiellay, a French ambassador for human rights who worked closely with Eizenstat on the accord, said “hundreds” of people in the US are eligible under the new fund as direct survivors or spouses, and several thousand could be eligible as heirs. The money should break down to about $100,000 each for survivors and tens of thousands of dollars for spouses, said Eizenstat.
Only in 1995 did France acknowledge a direct role in the Holocaust, when then-President Jacques Chirac said the state bore responsibility. Subsequent compensation programs paid out compensation worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The German government has paid around $85 billion in compensation for Nazi crimes.
France already has international accords with four countries — Poland, Belgium, Britain and the Czech Republic — over compensation for deportation victims. Friday’s deal aims to fill the remaining gaps in justice for others also affected.
Although SNCF is not a party to the agreement, the company will contribute $4 million over the next five years to fund Holocaust memorials and museums in the United States., Israel and France, according to Eizenstat. The French government had pledged to encourage French lawmakers to approve the deal, Eizenstat said.
