Buoyed by a recent French court decision, families of hundreds of Holocaust victims are demanding more than $162 million from the government of France and the country’s national railroad, SNCF, a lawyer in New York said.

Letters making the demands went out last Thursday to the French Interior Ministry and to SNCF, the lawyer, Harriet Tamen, said. The 378 letters request reparations for the pain and suffering that hundreds of victims and survivors endured.

In all, Ms. Tamen said she represents the families of 671 Holocaust victims and 111 survivors. They include Jews, members of the French Resistance, American Air Force pilots, homosexuals, and Gypsies who were interned in French camps and then transported by French rail eastward and mostly to their deaths, she said.

The letters detail the length of time each person was detained in France and how many French trains each boarded. The group Ms. Tamen represents is one of the largest to press SNCF for compensation since June, when a court in Toulouse ordered the state and railroad to pay $85,000 to the families of deportees.

On Monday, the International Herald Tribune reported that 200 other families also are planning to file such letters in France. “I expect they’re going to ignore the letters and then we’re going to have to go to court in France,” Ms. Tamen said, referring to SNCF and the French government.

Along with several other lawyers, Ms. Tamen also represents about 500 Holocaust victims and survivors in a lawsuit in America against the railroad and the French government. Because of legal precedent, that lawsuit, filed in March of this year in federal court in Manhattan, only demands restitution for property, such as rings and watches, stolen from the victims as they were transported by rail from internment camps in France. Many of the plaintiffs were held in the camp at Drancy, outside Paris.

[A lawyer acting for the group of 200 families of Holocaust survivors, Matthieu Delmas, told the Daily Telegraph that their hopes had been raised by a “very clear and rigorous” judgment in Toulouse that ordered SNCF and the French government to pay almost $85,000 in compensation for the wartime treatment of two relatives of the French Euro-MP Alain Lipietz.

Both were freed after being held briefly in a transit camp at Drancy, outside Paris, and survived the war.

Most of the cases represented by Mr. Delmas and Corinne Hershkovitch, acting for the larger group, involve families who lost one or more members in the death camps.

“The Interior Ministry paid SNCF for third-class passenger travel for the deportees, but most were herded into cattle and goods wagons,” Mr. Delmas said. “So the railway operator not only provided the means of deportation but profited from the operation.”

Ms. Hershkovitch said it was possible that descendants of 20% of the 75,000 Jews deported from France would come forward to join the existing claimants.

A retired tailor, Felix Szmidt, 79, was a teenager when he was arrested with his mother, Sarah, and 3-year-old brother Simon by gendarmes at their Paris home in 1944. His father, David, was already dead, having been detained three years earlier, and another brother spent the rest of the war hiding with cousins.

“The memory plays tricks, but I will never forget the awful way we were penned together for a day and a half in the train,” Mr. Szmidt said at his small flat in Paris.”How people could do such things to one another defies belief. We were separated soon after arrival, and I never saw them again.”]