Maryland Mulls Reparation Push From French Rail Firm

[mota bhai 2,675]

Maryland lawmakers are preparing to debate a bill next month that would block a Paris-based rail company from bidding on the state’s $2.2 billion light rail project unless its parent company pays Holocaust survivors reparations for transporting them to Nazi death camps.

At the same time, the State Department opened formal negotiations Feb. 6 with representatives of the French foreign and defense ministries regarding reparations payments to American Holocaust survivors who were aboard those trains.

...

Harriet Tamen, a Manhattan attorney who filed suit in the U.S. in 2000 seeking to compel the French railroad, Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Francais (SNCF), to pay reparations ... said she welcomed the discussions.

...
But even if the negotiations were to prove successful, Tamen said they would provide reparations for American citizens only. “That is unacceptable to us,” she said. “The railroad did not care about nationality when you were put on the train and sent to Auschwitz — it was an equal opportunity deporter. We represent people from all over the world, over 650. Some are the children [of deportees] and some were on the trains themselves.”

http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/national/maryland-mulls-reparation-push-french-rail-firm-0