An official report in Belgium has rejected calls to pay compensation to Holocaust survivors over the role the country’s nationalised rail company played in death camp deportations.
The World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO) accused the independent comittee of evading responsibility and denying its moral obligation to survivors.
The report, released after years of study and with the number of elderly Holocaust survivors fading fast, concluded that the railway firm did not owe compensation to survivors for its part in facilitating the genocide.
Belgium’s National Rail Company (SNCB), founded by the national government in 1926, was paid the equivalent of millions of dollars by the Nazis for its services, according to a 2023 report by a war research center attached to the State Archives of Belgium.
Almost six years ago, the country’s parliament passed a resolution calling for an independent investigation into the SNCB’s role in deporting over 25,000 Jews and more than 350 Roma on 28 convoys from Mechelen to extermination camps during the Holocaust. Most of the deportees were murdered on arrival.
“To reject compensation from the perpetrator to the victim denies the moral obligation by SNCB to those it wronged; instead it would allow the railroad to dilute and evade the necessity of taking any current action by permitting it to spread the blame widely across Belgian society," the WJRO statement said.
The organisation claimed that the recommendations from the report, presented to the government on January 17, “offered an important opportunity to confront the historical injustices suffered by Holocaust survivors and their families,” yet failed to do so. It also noted that the ruling contrasted with precedent of such payments in both France and the Netherlands.
“We urge the government to act quickly to ensure that the railway provides compensation to those who suffered and their heirs,” the WJRO statement continued.
However, the president of the WJRO, Gideon Taylor, told JNS that he expects that the new Belgian government may still support a compensation scheme despite the recommendations of the report.
