Time To Come Clean On Shoah Role

It can take 70 years for some French trains to run on time. And even then, you can’t rely on them. In February, French author Alain Lipietz reacted with scorn to the announcement that the SNCF, the French national railroad, intends to open its archives for the period of 1939–1945. …

Last December, media reports announced that some Holocaust survivors in Florida had succeeded in getting the state’s education commission to refuse a donation of $80,000 from SNCF America, the railroad company’s U.S. subsidiary, for a program focusing on France’s role in the Holocaust. The survivors persuasively argued that the SNCF has refused to pay reparations to victims. They further alleged that the SNCF’s attempt at a donation was merely a public relations ploy in order to secure billion-dollar contracts to build rapid trains in America.

The lure of these high-speed rail links has brought the SNCF within reach of American law. …

Alain Lipietz echoes his father’s view, ascribing the SNCF’s actions to “inhumanity, opportunism, and misplaced professional devotion.” He cites a document from the winter of 1942–1943 in which a German railway official, noting that trains are in such short supply, orders deportations of Jews to be temporarily halted. An SNCF civil servant writes back that “local arrangements” can be made so that the all-important removal of the Jews can continue at the usual rapid pace. Lipietz also points to a plaque installed at the railway station of Clermont-Ferrand to commemorate the last convoy, on August 20, 1944, reminding posterity that even so late in the war, more than two months after D-Day, French railway personnel were still hurrying Jews out of the country when German troops no longer guarded railway stops to enforce such deportations. …

As the lawsuits against the SNCF multiply, it is telling to recall the words of Georges Lipietz’s epitaph, which he wrote himself: “Having miraculously escaped from the claws of SS gangsters, [George Lipietz] never forgot the hundreds of little children who he saw disappearing towards a horrific death. He never forgave their Nazi executioners and especially not their heinous Vichy cohorts, whose zeal made such infamy happen.”

Now it seems as if much of the rest of the world, cannot forget. For years, as Alain Lipietz explains, many French people felt a kind of “filial piety” toward the SNCF, although that has been fading recently, after a series of strikes and related service problems. American Jews never felt any such devotion toward the SNCF, and they, much like Georges Lipietz, are persistently urging the French agency toward more transparency, against all the odds.