U.S. SURVIVORS JOIN HOLOCAUST SUIT AGAINST FRENCH RAILROAD

French railroad sued over Holocaust (SF Chron)
U.S. survivors join Paris lawsuit over transport links to Nazi death camps

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.