Only after 61 years had passed was France's state-owned
railroad company SNCF found guilt of deporting Jews in cattle
cars, pressed in behind locked doors. Last week a Toulouse
court circumvented all of the legal obstacles heaped on the
case by the French government (e.g. statute of limitations
and claims it was forced to cooperate with the occupying
forces), ordering the State and the railroad company to
compensate the Lipietz family. The company said it would
appeal the decision. The French government, at the time under
the Vichy Regime which collaborated with the Nazis, was fined
for failing to save Jews.
Jewish figures and the CRIF are not satisfied with the
conviction either. Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, whose son
represented the company in the case, said, "We would have
preferred that the railway workers had stopped them and that
the managers had not obeyed the orders of the police and the
Nazis. But not everyone is a hero. The Nazi government
appropriated the company. Should we try all of the French
whose property the Nazis used to deport the Jews?"
CRIF Chairman Roger Cukierman said that today the railroad
company is working to atone for the deportations by funding
Holocaust education. During the war the company took an
active role in deporting Jews, saving on costs by using
cattle cars. Company directors and employees treated the
passengers like cattle, not providing them with water or food
during the three-day journey to Poland. Historians have
determined without the railway system Hitler ym"sh
could not have carried out his plan.
The claim was filed five years ago by Alain Lipietz, a left-
wing economist and a parliamentarian representing the Green
Party. His father and family hid under a false identity in
Toulouse in Southern France. In May 1944 they were informed
on, arrested and transported in a cattle car to the Drancy
Transit Camp near Paris en route to the death camps in
Poland. In August 1944 they were released when Paris was
liberated from Nazi occupation.
The father passed away a few years ago, but his family
carried on the trial. During this period 300 relatives of
Holocaust survivors in the US unsuccessfully tried to sue the
SNCF after Kurt Shechter collected incriminating documents
against the company which transported his parents from Drancy
to Auschwitz. But Lipietz succeeded, even though his parents
were transported only as far as Drancy and survived.
Historian Raul Hilberg said the railway inspectors and
engineers went about their work as usual, without a word of
protest. Seventy-seven trains packed with Jews transported
victims from Drancy to Auschwitz and 76,000 French Jews
deported on SNCF trains perished at the concentration
camps.
Four hundred and sixty-seven railway workers received
National Badges of Shame for collaborating with the Nazis.
