Belgian panel: Railway should apologize but not pay for sending Jews to Nazi camps

The Belgian railway company that sent Jews to Nazi death camps should not have to pay compensation to survivors, a panel commissioned by the Belgian government has concluded.
The official report, released on Friday, ended a five-year investigation into the role that the Belgian National Railway Company played in the Holocaust. Between 1942 and 1944, the railway carried more than 25,000 Jews and 353 Roma to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Fewer than 1,200 people returned alive.
Belgium’s government opened an independent probe of the railway company, known by the acronym SNCB, in 2019. It invited a research center, the Study and Documentation Center for War and Contemporary Society, to investigate the railway’s role in the Holocaust. Last week, a committee revealed its recommendations based on what the researchers learned.
The committee said that SNCB should offer an official apology to survivors and urged expanded Holocaust education and commemoration initiatives, but stopped short of recommending reparations. Instead, they said the deportation trains were the “collective responsibility” of Belgian authorities and a silent, complacent Belgian public.
“The ultimate responsibility cannot therefore be attributed to a single person or even to a single company,” said the report.
One member of the commission, Belgian Supreme Court Judge Sidney Berneman, spoke strongly against the report’s conclusions. Berneman’s parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland who settled in Antwerp after the war.
“It is with a bitter feeling that I must give the final report a resounding fail and cannot in good conscience endorse it,” Berneman said. “The report does not honor the memory of thousands of Jews.”