A US lawmaker said Tuesday that he planned legislation to bar France's state-run SNCF railway from lucrative US high-speed rail contracts for its role in deporting Jews to Nazi death camps in World War II.
"No company whose trains carried innocent victims to death camps should have the right to lay the first inch of track in this country," Democratic Representative Ron Klein said in a statement.
Klein's bill, developed with help from Holocaust survivors and their families, targeted the SNCF's bids on high-speech rail projects in his home state of Florida – from Orlando to Tampa- and in California.
"I am a strong supporter of high-speed rail for the economic benefits it will bring to Florida, but moving ahead with SNCF's bid doesn't represent progress, it represents a major step backward and a direct insult to Holocaust survivors and their families," Klein said.
“We need to make clear that as Americans, we hold companies to a high standard of accountability, and more so than ever when that company had a direct role in the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust,” Klein said.
Klein’s bill, the Holocaust Accountability and Corporate Responsibility Act, would require firms seeking high-speed rail contracts to disclose any participation on Holocaust-era deportations to Nazi concentration camps, and to have "resolved" the issue with the victims or their families.
The measure would explicitly apply to firms that were, or are, state-owned, such as the SNCF.
Klein said the company has never issued an apology for its behavior or paid reparations to survivors or families.
The legislation does not specify what "resolved" would mean, but a Klein aide indicated that the SNCF could reach that goal by settling a class-action lawsuit brought by a coalition Holocaust survivors.
Early this month, 72-year-old Rosette Goldstein traveled from Boca Raton to a high-speed rail hearing in Orlando to press the issue.
"They must come clean. That's all I want," she told the SunSentinel. As a child she was hidden from the Nazis by a sympathetic French farmer. Her father was taken in a cattle car by the French national railway system to the camps, where he died.
She demanded that SNCF apologize, open its books from World War II and pay reparations.
"Why does a company like SNCF deserve my tax dollars when they collaborated willfully with the Nazis and deported 76,000 others to concentration camps?" she asked. "They never apologized or paid restitution."
California lawmakers voted in August to demand that bidders supply full details of any involvement in the deportations between 1942 and 1944, and of any reparations paid -- a requirement clearly aimed at the SNCF.
"We should not forget one thing: the SNCF, the railway workers were under the yoke of the Nazi occupiers, threatened with death... 2,000 railway workers were executed by the Nazis," SNCF chairman Guillaume Pepy said in late August.
Pepy, speaking to Europe 1 radio, said the company would give US authorities details of its role in the deportations.
Peter Kelly, a Los Angeles-based attorney for SNCF America, declared: “Since 1945 France and SNCF have supported reparations programs for Holocaust survivors. Now that SNCF is here in America we will shortly be announcing a program to assist American survivors in accessing the very substantial programs that presently exist in France.
Kelly acknowledged SNCF was involved in transporting Jews to death camps. “It was done at the end of a German rifle,” he said.
“If you were an SNCF employee you either obeyed or not only did you get shot but your family got shot. And I’ve read those orders, I’ve read the German orders to SNCF,” he said.