Word: french
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...ruling Monday, by the Conseil d'Etat, or State Council, was cheered by organizations representing French Jews and families of Jews who were deported during the war - a mere 3,000 of whom ultimately returned. The judgment involved the case of a 76 year-old woman seeking damages for the 1941 deportation of her father by Vichy forces to Auschwitz, where he was killed. In its decision, the Conseil d'Etat held the French state, as then represented by Vichy, "responsible for damages caused by actions which did not result from the occupiers' direct orders, but facilitated deportation from France...
...That ruling definitively buries historical interpretations rooted in the post-war reconciliation period. The common view, which has endured for decades, held that it was the Nazis who mistreated and deported France's Jews, or forced their French collaborators to. "This is a very satisfying ruling for me, in that it legally refutes the notion that the Vichy regime and the acts it committed were entirely the responsibility of German occupiers," says Serge Klarsfeld, France's leading Holocaust historian and Nazi hunter, whose own father perished in German camps. "What this says in legal terms is that as much...
...Klarsfeld notes, then-President Jacques Chirac gave a historical speech that sought to atone for the nation's dark past. Chirac broke with the traditional French depiction of wartime events by accepting, in the name of France, responsibility for the July 15-16, 1942 arrests of 13,000 Jews by French police. Known as the "Vel d'Hiv roundup" - after the name of the winter cycling stadium in Paris the deportees were held in - the infamous case was cited by Chirac as an example of active French participation in Jewish persecution. Chirac called on his French countrymen to accept responsibility...
...setback to the plaintiff by rejecting over $357,000 in damages she had sought for hardship resulting from her father's deportation. The reason: the Conseil ruled that organizations set up to pay deportees and their survivors damages, or to compensate them for belongings stolen by Nazis or their French collaborators, have proven to be capable of fairly settling damages without court involvement. (See pictures of the Nazis in Paris...
...Memorial Foundation have generated additional funding to those who suffered deportation. "It closes the door to further court cases in such affairs, but that only shows the system put in place to hear them is working," he says. What the Conseil decision doesn't do, Klarsfeld stresses, is force French society into a reckoning with its war-time past that foreigners often think it denies. That has already happened, according to Klarsfeld and others, often in a deeper way than in other countries...