Fwench Railway Catching Hell In Florida

Here's some red meat for the folks over at Stormfront and my friends at Kosland.

Go get 'em, tough-tards.

French railway faces criticism in US for WWII role

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The French national railway's hope to bid on the first high-speed tracks in the United States is running into resistance from Holocaust survivors because of the company's role in transporting Jews to Nazi death camps.

One of those leading the charge against the railway is Florida resident Rosette Goldstein, whose father was taken away by Nazi soldiers, shoved in a cattle train and delivered to his death during World War II. Goldstein plans to voice her opposition on behalf of many Holocaust survivors to the railway Thursday when the Florida Department of Transportation holds a public meeting in Orlando on the $2.6 billion high-speed rail project, which would connect Tampa and Orlando.

Goldstein and others — including legislators — want the railway, known as the SNCF, to formally apologize for its role in the war, give full access to its records and make reparations.

"Why does this company deserve my tax dollars when they cooperated with the Nazis and let their trains transport people to be murdered?" said Goldstein, 71, who lives in Boca Raton.

SNCF stands for Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Francais. The company has argued that it had no control over operations when France was under Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1944 and was under orders to transport Jews to death camps. The firm also has said the French government has made an apology and offered reparations, although survivors contend the company itself has never made such amends.

"We plan to have a full disclosure of our records and complete transparency," said Peter Kelly, an American-based attorney for SNCF. "The fact is many railway workers were killed by Nazis, many were bullied and the company was under control of an occupied government."

As part of your full dsiclosure, Mr. Kelly, be sure and include copies of the billing statements SCNF submitted to the French government after the war.

Not everybody accepts that explanation.

Rositta Ehrlich Kenigsberg, vice president at the Holocaust Documentation & Education Center in South Florida, said corporations such as SNCF have long used coercion as an excuse. She said SNCF profited greatly from the transports, charging per person and kilometer.

"Being a collaborator and saying you were coerced is not acceptable," she said. "Nobody bought that at the Nuremberg Trials, Rwanda, Darfur and other genocides. You can't help murder people and then just say, 'Well, we were coerced.'"

In California, lawmakers passed a bill last month that forces companies hoping to compete for a piece of California's $45 billion high-speed rail project to disclose whether they transported Holocaust victims. SNCF is also hoping for that project and said it has no problems with the bill.

Florida lawmakers are also stepping into the fray.

U.S. Rep. Ron Klein, a Democrat who represents portions of Broward and Palm Beach counties, a district with a high Jewish population, said he was writing a letter to Florida Gov. Charlie Crist asking for some of the same things Goldstein wants.

"This was a company that was taken and used by the Nazis that profited from the deaths of tens of thousands of people," said Klein, who is also Jewish and serves on the board at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

SNCF employs 175,000 people and operates 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) of high-speed lines in France, and is generally respected as a heavyweight in French industry. But the company has had a hard time erasing its past.

Between 1941 and 1944, 3,000 wagons — originally designed for the transportation of cattle — were used by the SNCF to transport Jews to Nazi death camps, according to a study by French historian Christian Bachelier, ordered by SNCF in 1996. The study points out that there were acts of resistance, but they were sparse, isolated and mostly by workers — not SNCF administration.

SNCF is among about 30 companies hoping to bid for the Florida contract. Transportation officials are going through paperwork the companies have submitted.

Plans for high-speed rails were announced by President Barack Obama in January. Florida would get $1.25 billion in stimulus money and trains are expected to begin operating at speeds up to 168 mph by 2015.

At the very least, SNCF faces big challenges trying to win U.S bids.

"The court of public opinion may already have convicted them, and politicians don't want to be called soft on the Holocaust or anything," said Winston Nagan, a professor of international law and human rights at the University of Florida.

Goldstein and others whose families were wiped out have vowed to raise their voices.

Goldstein was 4 years old when she hid with another family on a farm outside Paris as her father enlisted at a nearby labor camp to avoid internment. He often sneaked away at night to see her, then one night he didn't come.

She said he was transported by an SNCF train — Convoy No. 32 — to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald and finally Langenstein-Zwieberge, where he was killed by Nazis just five days before the camp was liberated by Americans.

"If SNCF had resisted even a little, more people could have been spared," she said. "What's worse, is the way they've ignored us. Is it so hard to say, 'I'm sorry?' I'm one of the youngest survivors — soon there's not going to be any. We have to make sure people don't forget what happened."

Via The AP

Guilty: France 'Responsible' for Holocaust Deaths

I imagine in some quarters the first reaction will be to blame the Jooooos. On the upside, this is 60 years late in acknowledging, but at least they're accepting some responsibility for their Nazi collaboration.

France bears responsibility for deporting Jews to their deaths in concentration camps during World War II, the country's highest court ruled Monday.

But, the Council of State said, "measures taken since the end of the Second World War have compensated for the damage."

In other words, go away, we're tired of hearing about this.

Most of the deportees later perished at the concentration camp at Auschwitz in modern day Poland. Papon died in February 2007, aged 96, after serving part of his term and then being freed on health grounds.

There were approximately 350,000 Jews in France at the time of the country's defeat by Germany in 1940. At least half of those were refugees who had already fled Germany or countries already under Nazi occupation, according to the Web site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

At least 77,000 Jews were deported to their deaths from French transit camps between 1942 and the end of German occupation in December 1944. Of theese, around a third were French citizens and more than 8,000 were children under 13.

Horror in France: Sarko Wants to Remember the Holocaust

Not only does he want to honor French victims of the Holocaust, he has the temerity to suggest France remember their Christian faith.

Why, is this man crazy or something?

President Nicolas Sarkozy has triggered a row over religion by saying faith has a place in the public sphere and schoolchildren should study the 11,000 French Jewish child victims of the Holocaust.

Sarkozy has angered secularists with repeated praise for faith and references to France's Christian roots, and he told a French Jewish organization that the violence and wars of the 20th century were due to an "absence of God".

Why do these lefties get so angry when someone expresses their faith.

Perhaps they ought to attend anger management classes and seek to find the root cause for their anger.

Ten-year-old pupils "should know the name and life story of a child who died in the Holocaust", he told the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) on Wednesday.

He attracted criticism on Thursday from two camps -- secularists keen to keep religion out of public discourse and those worried that pupils could be traumatized by studying the Holocaust through child victims with whom they could identify.

"The president should not turn into a kind of preacher, as he is doing now," said left-wing Senator Jean-Luc Melenchon. Centrist deputy Francois Bayrou predicted "a clash between France's values and those of Nicolas Sarkozy".

What values are those? Capitulation? Collaboration? Laziness? Whining?

Whatever It Takes

German pupils given Holocaust comic book
German school students have been issued with a comic book account of the Holocaust as a teaching aid to learn the lessons of history.

Die Suche, or The Search, tells the fictional story of Daniel, who after seeking information on the Holocaust on the internet, hears a first hand account from his grandmother Esther, who as a young Jewish girl saw her parents deported to their death in Auschwitz.

She, though betrayed by neighbours, survives.

"Through the comic format, the subject becomes more realistic and closer to home for young people," said Julia Franz of the Anne Frank Zentrum.

"There is definitely a huge knowledge gap among teenagers. Most know about the Third Reich but there are lots of myths, prejudices and misunderstandings."

The book, produced by the Anne Frank Zentrum in Berlin, has already been used in the Netherlands and is also to be piloted in Poland and Hungary - all countries that lost millions of Jews to horrors of Nazi death camps.

Eric Heuvel, the book's Dutch graphic artist, previously worked as a history teacher and The Search is his sequel to his first book on Esther and Daniel's story, The Family Secret.

To create the story in the “Clear Line” style made famous by Herge's Tintin books, historians were closely involved and many of Mr Heuvel's drawings are based on original Nazi-era photographs.

Die Suche's publication and issue to students marks the 75th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's rise to power and the stepped-up efforts to make sure young Germans do not forget the darkest moment in European history.

The book is also available in English from the Anne Frank House, in Amsterdam.

Via The Telegraph

David Irving was unavailable for comment.

Carnival Float 'Commemorates' Holocaust

Nothing quite brings out the festive mood of Carnival down in Brazil like a float depicting images of the Holocaust.

Seriously folks, there's a time and place to observe the Holocaust, and this isn't it.

A Carnival float with a pile of model dead bodies commemorating the Holocaust is causing unease before the lavish parades in Rio de Janeiro this weekend.

The Viradouro samba organization, or school, plans to feature the grim display when it marches in the Sambadrome parade strip on Sunday, despite objections from a local Jewish group.

"Really, it makes no sense addressing this theme with drums and dancing girls," said Sergio Niskier, president of the Israelite Federation in Rio de Janeiro state, referring to the slaughter of Jews by Nazi Germany in World War Two.

"There are still survivors of that horror who have the marks of that tragedy on their skin," he said.

Rio's Carnival is famed for the parades by samba schools with glitzy floats and costumes and street parties where costumed revelers drink and dance all night.

The elaborately decorated floats are a key part of each samba school's presentation, along with thousands of dancers and drummers led by near naked Carnival queens.

Viradouro insisted its Holocaust float is not meant to offend anyone.

Will The Nobel Go To A Heroine Or Huckster?

Irena Sendler is 97-years young.

During World War Two, she risked her life in an heroic effort to save Jewish kids from the German death factories. "She is the last surviving person from the group she worked with that ran an underground network to save these children ...."

On October 12, 2007, will the Nobel Committee honor a true heroine?

Or, will they play politics join the 'global warming' alarmists and honor al-Gore - the leader of the cult - his motives notwithstanding?

We report. You decide.

Irena Sendler for Nobel Peace Prize

Irena Sendler is a Polish heroine who risked her life to save lives of Jewish children from Gestapo and Nazi death camps during World War II.

In German-occupied Poland, a Pole assisting Jews would get a death sentence.

Irena worked as senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department that ran the canteens of the city, when Germany invaded the country in 1939. The canteens not only provided food, financial aid and other services for orphans, elderly, and poor but also clothing, medicine and money for Jewish families. To avoid inspections, they were registered under fictitious Catholic names and they were reported as patients suffering highly contagious diseases such as typhus or tuberculosis.

In 1942, with the designation of a closed area to herd Jews, known as the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish families could only wait for a certain death. In October 1942, when the Council for Aid to Jews - codename Zegota - was organized by the Polish Underground, Sendler was one of its first recruits.

Irena managed to get a pass from the Warsaw Epidemic Control Department to be able to enter the ghetto legally. She and her co-conspirator, Irena Schultz, visited ghetto daily with the aim of reestablishing contacts, bringing food, medicines and clothes. However, given the terrible conditions in the Ghetto, where 5,000 people were dying a month from starvation and disease, the two decided to help people, particularly children, to get out of the Ghetto.

Persuading parents to separate from their children was a horrible task for Irena, a young mother herself. Finding families on the Christian - so called Aryan side - willing to shelter the children, and thereby willing to risk being executed if the Germans ever found out, was also not easy.

She started to smuggle children in an ambulance as victims of typhus, but also in gunnysacks, garbage cans, toolboxes, loads of goods, potato sacks, coffins. Other methods included a church with two entrances, one opened into the ghetto and the other opened into the Aryan side of Warsaw. Children entered the Church Jews and exited as Christians. Irena could recruit at least one person from each of the ten Centers of the Social Welfare Department. With their help, she issued hundreds of false documents with forged signatures, giving the Jewish children temporary identities.

It was easier to escape the ghetto than to survive the Aryan side. The rescue of a child required help of at least ten people.

As a rule, the children were first placed in a temporary shelter, then to a foster home after they had somewhat recovered from their period of destitution. There was also a need to wait for them to receive from the Polish Underground false identity papers that were good enough to pass German muster. Each child had to be provided with a factitious birth and baptismal certificate and a family history of parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, etc. which the children, if old enough, had to commit to memory. "I sent most of the children to religious establishments," she recalled. "I knew that I could count on the Sisters." Irena kept record, in coded form, of the children and their true identities.

The only record of their true identities was kept in jars buried beneath an apple tree in the neighbor’s back yard, across the street from the German barracks. She hoped she could someday locate the children and inform them of their past.

In all, the jars contained the names of 2,500 children...

On October 20, 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo. Although subjected to beatings and torture during which both of her feet and legs were broken, but not her spirit: she revealed nothing. Never again would she be able to walk without crutches. Irena spent three months in the Pawiak prison where she was sentenced to death.

She was rescued by Zegota which, fearful that she would break down and reveal the location of the children, managed to bribe a guard to check off her name on a list of those already executed. As a result, she was listed on public bulletin boards as among those on whom a sentence of death had been carried out.

Rescued, she had to assume a completely new identity and live an entirely new life. She could not visit her dying mother, nor attend her funeral. But she did again become deeply involved in the work of Zegota.

At the end of the war, Irena dug up the jars and used the notes to find the 2.500 children she had given to adoptive families. She reunited them with their relatives scattered across Europe, but most of them had lost their families in Nazi concentration camps.

After the war she worked for Social Welfare; she helped create houses for elderly people, orphanages and an emergency service for children.

In 1965 the Yad Vashem organization in Jerusalem awarded her with the title Righteous Among the Nations and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel.

"If Sendler actually wins, this will be the first time a Nobel prize would have been awarded in connection to the Holocaust." (haaretz.com)

Via Polonia News

Also at abcnews.com