The head of SNCF, France's national railway company, recently delivered the first public apology directly to Holocaust victims. "In the name of the SNCF, I bow down before the victims, the survivors, the children of those deported, and before the suffering that still lives," said company chairman, Guillaume Pepy, at a ceremony held at a station in Bobigny, a Paris suburb. Officials and Jewish dignitaries were in the audience. Pepy also announced that they would be handing the station over to local authorities for a memorial to the 2,000 Jews shipped from there to Nazi concentration camps (The Age). .
The apology came after years of litigation from legislators, survivors, their descendants and some American Jewish organizations, who argued that the company had never acknowledged or apologized for shipping 76,000 European Jews to the Franco-German border from 1941 to 1944. The Jews were then transported to Nazi death camps (The Age). .
Although many survivors have waited a long time for the apology, many of them were enraged at the manner in which it was given. SNCF only gave an apology because US legislators, survivors, and their descendants moved to block the company from getting contracts in the US if it did not admit its role in the shipping of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps and make amends. SNCF was looking to lay tracks in Florida and California. Ron Klein, a Florida Democrat in the US House of Representatives, was one of the legislators to oppose SNCF from making business in the US. He introduced a bill seeking to require all companies competing for US high speed rail contracts to reveal any role they might have had in deporting Jews and others to Nazi death camps in the war. "No company whose trains carried innocent victims to death camps should have the right to lay the first inch of track in this country," he said (The Age).
Mr. Pepy denies that the US requests prompted an apology from the SNCF.