U.S.-France Holocaust-reparation talks renew focus on firm planning bid on Purple Line job
Source: Washington Post
The French government has begun negotiating with the State Department over paying reparations to America’s Holocaust survivors who were deported to Nazi death camps in French trains — a decades-old controversy now surrounding a French company bidding on Maryland’s $2.2 billion light-rail Purple Line project.
Stuart Eizenstat, a Washington lawyer serving as special adviser to Secretary of State John F. Kerry on Holocaust issues, confirmed Thursday that he and several State Department officials met with French officials Feb. 6 in Paris, an extension of informal discussions over the past year.
“To the great credit of the French, they came to us and said they’d recognized there were ‘holes in the blanket’ of their (Holocaust reparations) program that didn’t cover Americans” who were deported on French trains during World War II, he said. Eizenstat negotiated similar compensation agreements between the United States and Germany, Switzerland and Austria during the Clinton administration.
The question of how much the government-owned French railway owes to U.S. Holocaust survivors has come to a head in Maryland. Legislation introduced Jan. 31 in the state’s General Assembly would block a subsidiary of the French railway from winning a contract for the proposed 16-mile Purple Line until the railway compensates U.S. victims. If approved, it would be the first state law to ban companies with Holocaust ties from receiving U.S. government contracts until reparations are paid. The rail company subsidiary, Keolis, has already won nearly $3 billion in U.S. contracts.
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/us-french-talks-begin-on-compensation-for-holocaust-victims-deported-on-sncf-trains/2014/02/20/ace89634-9a4d-11e3-b931-0204122c514b_story.html?hpid=z2
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