On December 2, 2020, we blogged on Germany’s recent decision to expand pension payments to spouses of Holocaust survivors who are now deceased. Under the amended criteria, spouses are entitled to this payment for up to nine months. Prior to this decision, pension payments expired upon the survivor’s death.

Deeply intrigued by this dark period in our relatively recent history and the effects it continues to have on the heirs and estates of survivors in our modern world, we have again chosen to focus our blog on Holocaust reparations – this time from the French government.

In 2014, France agreed to pay reparations, in the amount of $60 million to certain qualifying Holocaust survivors, their heirs and their estates (known as the “The 2014 Agreement”). This Agreement was proposed in response to a lawsuit initiated by non-French survivors who had been deported to death camps from France via S.N.C.F., which was a state-owned railway system. Survivors argued that S.N.C.F. was complicit with the Nazis’ premeditated murders during World War 2. France ultimately agreed to pay survivors who had been transported to concentration camps via S.N.C.F. reparations in exchange for recipients agreeing to renounce their right to sue.

The 2014 Agreement sought to distribute reparations to victims who had been largely ignored under prior agreements and settlements.

Former Ambassador and the State Department’s expert advisor on Holocaust issues, Stuart Eizenstat, assisted in negotiating this Agreement. As a result of the Agreement, forty-nine survivors received approximately $400,000 in reparations. Thirty-two spouses of survivors who had already passed on received up to $100,000 under this Agreement. Heirs and estates of deportees were also eligible for payment.

Holocaust survivors constitute a unique population of individuals who were robbed of the opportunity to inherit wealth.  Though reparations cannot make up for the suffering of the past, they represent a recognition of fault and soothe, for some, the pain of loss.

Thanks for reading!

Suzana Popovic-Montag & Tori Joseph