In December, some Holocaust survivors and their family members got good news. Seventy years after French trains began transporting some 76,000 deportees from France to concentration camps in Germany and Poland, the United States and France signed an agreement that gives Holocaust survivors who were deported on those trains $60 million in reparations. Once the funding is approved by the French parliament, the money will be distributed by the U.S. Department of State to several thousand claimants, survivors or their family members.
The railway company, Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF), was operated by the French government during the Nazi occupation. France had reparations programs set up for former deportees in France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Poland and the United Kingdom, but none for American survivors of the deportations. “France recognizes that Americans and other foreigners deported during the Holocaust have not been able to gain access to the French pension program, and has agreed to compensate them through this agreement,” the French and American governments said in a joint statement.
