French railroad sued over Holocaust / U.S. survivors join Paris lawsuit over transport links to Nazi death camps

2007-03-18 04:00:00 PDT Paris -- Ernest Hirsch was a scared 9-year-old in a French children's home the last time he heard from his mother.

The boy had been rescued from the French internment camp Rivesaltes in 1941, but his parents were still trapped there when his mother, Lisa Kirchheimer, wrote that they were about to be moved.

"She said not to worry; that we would see each other again. She said she loved me," recalled Hirsch, a retired operations research analyst who lives in Orinda.

Shortly after Hirsch got that letter, his parents were forced onto a train headed for death. When they arrived at Auschwitz, "they were marched directly to the gas chambers and killed," he said.

Hirsch, 75, is one of more than 100 Americans who have joined a groundbreaking legal action here against the French railway Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer (SNCF), which transported thousands of Jews during World War II to transit hubs on their way to their deaths. It's the same state-owned train system that now carries commuters to their jobs. Some 76,000 Jews in France were transported to Nazi death camps; only 2,500 of them survived.

In a first-of-its-kind ruling last summer, 62 years after the war ended, an administrative tribunal in Toulouse, France, fined the SNCF and the French republic $80,000 for their role in transporting a Jewish family. The railway is appealing.

French attorneys have filed the first wave of more than 200 new complaints against the railroad, half of them from survivors who now live in the United States.

"This is a critical issue for the French -- and the world," said Corinne Hershkovitch, one of the Paris attorneys involved. "It's not only an issue of money, but one of responsibility. What role did the SNCF play in this crime?"

The case could be one of the last significant legal actions on behalf of Holocaust survivors, many of whom have already died of old age. Germany and German businesses have paid billions of dollars -- much of it the result of court cases -- in insurance claims, restitution for seized property and bank accounts, as well as compensation to slave laborers and victims' families. European insurance companies and Swiss banks have been sued for failing to honor obligations to survivors of their Jewish customers. Four years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a 1999 California law requiring insurance firms licensed to do business in the state to account for World War II-era policies they or their affiliates sold in Europe from 1920 to 1945.

The Toulouse finding is the first such ruling against the French republic or one of its agencies. In 2001, French banks reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with Holocaust victims in a suit brought by a New York law firm. The French government also voluntarily pays a pension to current and former French residents orphaned by Nazi atrocities.

Like Hirsch, retired engineer Manfred Wildmann, 76, of Menlo Park, was freed from a French camp and taken to a children's home. His parents also died at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp near Krakow, Poland. The day he left them, he said, "I remember sitting on a truck with other kids. My mother was standing below, crying."

The path was cleared for the latest lawsuits with a ruling in June concerning relatives of European Parliament member Alain Lipietz, who were shipped to a transit hub outside Paris, but were freed by the Allies.

The judges held that SNCF administrators failed to protest the transports -- and failed to prove they were under duress not to protest. The ruling said the railway moved family members in a manner "incompatible with human dignity," without food, water or "minimal hygienic conditions." It also noted that Lipietz's relatives were transported, as deportees typically were at the time, packed into a cattle car -- yet the SNCF billed for passengers at third-class rates, and continued to charge the French government even after the country was liberated from Nazi domination.

The suits have deeply divided the French Jewish community. SNCF officials argue that the agency had no choice but to follow the orders of the Germans and the collaborationist Vichy government. It's a position supported by some French historians, who have also expressed concern about a backlash against the Jewish community.

Paris attorney Arno Klarsfeld, son of famed French Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, wrote in Le Monde newspaper following the June decision that the deportations were an "authoritative act of state from which the SNCF could not shrink."

For Abe Dresdner, 78, of Brooklyn, whose family managed to survive the war, the "French were as bad as the Gestapo." French police and rail workers "stole everything from us except the clothes on our backs," he said.

Others in the suit, like Wildmann, are more ambivalent about the culpability of the French railway, but believe the litigation may serve to shed light on the issue. "I don't know how much freedom the French (running the SNCF) had to choose," he said.

A similar case against the French railroad was filed several years ago in New York, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the French agency was protected by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. Ironically, the SNCF does not have the same protection in France. American law does allow exceptions, including suits seeking restitution for stolen property.

"That means you can sue in a U.S. court if Mommy lost her handbag when she was forced on the train in France, but not if she lost her life at Auschwitz," said New York attorney Harriet Tamen, who is representing some 500 clients against the SNCF in a class action case seeking restitution for stolen property.

Meanwhile, time for payback is running out for Holocaust survivors.

"My baby sister is one of the youngest survivors and she's already 67," said Dresdner. "We've been waiting a long time."