Suit Seeks Damages for Property Of Jews Sent to Nazi Camps
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
A lawsuit yesterday sought damages from the French government for property lost by 75,000 Jews and tens of thousands of other “undesirables” who were sent to Nazi death camps during World War II.
The lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan was brought by Holocaust victims and their heirs. It said France during the war established and ran holding camps where people being shipped out were forced to turn over all personal belongings.
Those belongings included cash, securities, silver, gold, jewelry, works of art, musical instruments, clothing, and equipment, the lawsuit said.
A group of plaintiffs, heirs, and beneficiaries sought an accounting, disgorgement, restitution, and recovery of compensatory and punitive damages.
The lawsuit named as defendants the Republic of France and its national railroad, the Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Francais, which it said assembled and ran the trains that transported the victims.
A third defendant, Caisse des Depots et Consignations, the national public depository of France, accepted and held the plaintiffs’ property, the lawsuit said.
A spokeswoman at the French Embassy in Washington, Agnes Vondermuhll, said she had not seen the lawsuit and could not immediately comment.
U.S. subsidiaries of both companies did not immediately return telephone messages for comment.
A professor at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law who worked on the lawsuit, Lucille Roussin, said victims were spread around the world, including in France, Canada, Britain, and Australia.
She said about 300 victims or family members, many of them in America, had contacted lawyers working on the lawsuit and others were expected to do so once they heard about it.
She said one woman recalled that her mother’s earrings were ripped off her head as she entered a detention camp in France while a young musician had his violin taken away.
“Everything they had was taken from them,” she said. “This isn’t about money. It’s about memory, and it’s about justice. These people deserve recognition of what they went through or what their parents went through.”
