Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) helped transport Jews, Roma and Sinti to a transit camp, Westerbork, and then on to extermination and concentration camps
August 5, 2019 12:13
The Dutch national railway company which transported almost 100,000 Jews to concentration camps during the Holocaust has announced it is now ready to begin compensation payments to survivors and their families, opening its application process.
The announcement came six weeks after Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), the publicly owned company, accepted a recommendation from a committee it set up last year to investigate the company’s culpability in the genocide.
It had already accepted the need to pay reparations last year but had set up the committee to determine the amount it should pay.
During Second World War, the Germans paid the Dutch company more than £2,300,000 for use of its rolling stock to transport Jews from Westerbork to extermination camps including Auschwitz and Sobibor and concentration camps such as Theresienstadt and Bergen Belsen.
Thousands of Roma and Sinti, Romani groups also targeted by the Nazis in the Holocaust, were also transported from there via NS train cars.
As well as being paid for the transportation, NS charged the Holocaust victim five guilders for their own transportation to the camp.
Holocaust survivors from all three groups directly transported by the company will be able to claim approximately £13,700, while children born to survivors before the end of Second World War will receive around £6,900.
Children born after the war to survivors will get roughly £4,600.
In a statement, Gideon Taylor, chair of operations at the World Jewish Restitution Organisation (WJRO) called the move a “significant acknowledgement of the role the NS played during World War Two in the suffering endured by Dutch Jews transported on NS trains.
Mr Taylor also said the committee NS set up had advised that the company also provide “a ‘collective expression of recognition of the suffering and fate’ of the vast majority of Dutch Holocaust victims who did not survive following transport by NS or are not covered by NS’s compensation program.”
He recommended that the rail company designate official funds and work with both the WJRO and the Dutch Jewish community to achieve this.
NS’s official acceptance of its committee’s recommendations came in June, after years of campaigning by Salo Muller, whose parents were both deported from Amsterdam to Westerbork and then on to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.
Mr Muller, who went on to work as a physiotherapist for Ajax Amsterdam football club, went on to write a book about his family - See You Tonight and Promise to Be a Good Boy – the last words his mother ever said to him as she dropped him off at kindergarten. The SS took her away later that day.
In an interview with the De Volkskrant newspaper last month, Mr Muller said he was not yet sure if he was going to apply for the compensation.
“I didn’t do it for the money”, he told the paper. “I wanted the Dutch Railways to see how wrong they were.”
