KURT SCHAECHTER could have been forgiven for wanting a quiet retirement after twice surviving arrest by the wartime Vichy regime and entering the French Resistance using false identity papers that disguised his Jewish origins.

But this week he will take the SNCF, the French railway network, to court for an unprecedented hearing into its role in transporting French Jews to Nazi concentration camps between 1942 and 1944.

M Schaechter, 82, is suing the state-owned railway for deporting his father, Emil, to the Sobibor concentration camp in 1943 and his mother, Margaret, to Auschwitz a year later. Neither returned.

He is demanding damages of €1 (67.5p), arguing that the SNCF infringed basic human rights when his parents were crammed into the cattle wagons that took them to their deaths.

“It is a merely symbolic sum, but what can you ask in compensation for the lives of your parents? There is no amount that you can fix for that. This is a case for history, so that people remember what happened,” he said at his home in Alfortville, a Paris suburb.

About 77,000 Jews were deported from France by train during the Second World War, and 75,721 died. Although this is by no means the first case to be brought against the SNCF over deportation, it is the first to have come to court.

Previous criminal cases against the railway network failed because France did not adopt legislation enabling organisations as well as individuals to be prosecuted until 1994. Judges ruled that the legislation was not retroactive.

M Schaechter is bringing a civil action, saying that the conditions in which his parents had been forced to travel were inhuman. “If they had been taken in normal trains, it would have been difficult to sue the SNCF because it could have argued that it knew nothing about the extermination camps at the end of the journey. But when people were travelling like cattle and dying along the way, it is a different matter,” he said.

SNCF managers are concerned that a victory for M Schaechter could lead to similar claims and are disputing the case on the ground that a legal action can be brought only in connection with events less than ten years old.

But in court on Wednesday, Maître Joseph Roubache, M Schaechter’s lawyer, will argue that the ten-year rule applies from the moment that the events come to light and not when they occurred. He will say that the case is admissible because M Schaechter discovered the role of the SNCF over the past decade after photocopying 12,000 Vichy documents held in archives in Toulouse, southwest France.

Among them was his mother’s identity card. There were also the instructions on the types of train to be used for deportation: “Covered wagons for the men. Third-class wagons with corridors without lateral doors for women, children under 15, elderly, sick and handicapped.” Up to 100 people were herded into each wagon. Many suffocated.

He also found invoices sent by the SNCF to the Interior Ministry for the cost of deportation. One, for the first three months of 1944, is for Fr210,385.09.

M Schaechter said: “It was the senior directors of the SNCF who first proposed to Vichy officials that people held in internment camps in France should be deported. They said that would make room in the French internment camps for others. They did this for money, to improve their annual accounts. When you know that, you can understand why I’m taking action against the SNCF.”

M Schaechter and his parents fled Austria in 1938. They planned to travel to Canada but were blocked in France and settled in a village near Toulouse.

DEBATE

Does SNCF have a case to answer?

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