Survivors Demand Right to Sue Over Holocaust Trains
Aged Holocaust survivors made impassioned pleas to the US Congress Wednesday to allow them to sue France's state-owned SNCF railway over its role in World War II deportations to Nazi death camps."We are asking for the right to personally, rightfully claim what is ours," said Renee Firestone who was born in the former Czechoslovakia and spent 13 months in Auschwitz before liberation and emigrating to the United States.
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It is difficult for me to comment on this without some background information, but I am certainly interested in the situation. There are no words that can express my anger for the atrocities that took place. However, if the French rail system was operating under German domain and occupation, at the time....I do not see the point. Germany would still be responsible for the deportation, in that it was using and abusing another country.
If you go back to the root of the problem, Germany occupied France - and in that, everything that belonged to France - infrastructure and the day to day running of the country. France's law no longer applied - they were under occupancy.
That being so, can we honestly say that every German person, civilian or military at the time, had the same bad intent as Hitler - or was it under fear of death to themselves and their family that they 'co-operated'?
Also, the local people who were forced to build the death camps, the holding yards, the crematoriums at Auschwicz, Birkenau, Terazin etc...are they responsible for the atrocities that occurred there?
No amount of compensation will bring anybody forefathers back, nor repay for all the suffering.
All we need to do is to learn from this and ensure that this never happens again.
I can't help wondering when we are finally going to let go of World War II and the trauma's suffered by tens of millions of people. I myself spent three years in Japanese concentration camps as a young child, an experience that tore our family apart. My parents never completely recovered, they survived but their marriage was over. I did not see my mother again for 20 years. One of my cousins died at the hands of the Japanese. She was 2½ years old! What I am getting at with all this is that I cannot imagine wanting to sue the Japanese or the owners of the trucks, trains and ships that took us into imprisonment, nor do I have the slightest interest in keeping it all "alive". I don't have any strong feelings about the Japanese either for or against, and wouldn't be interested in suing a Japanese company or a Japanese-controlled company today for something their grandfathers did. The people who own/run the French railways system today are already two generations down the line from those do ran the trains of France during World War II. I am not saying we should just "forgive and forget", but I wish we could move on.....