Laggardly Reclaiming Honour Posthumously

"[Company involvement in the deportations of Jews] is a black page in the history of our country and our company."
"For us it is important to put care ahead of speed [in determining how many survivors or their families would be eligible for reparations]."
Erik Kroeze, Dutch national railway company spokesman

 Dutch Jews rounded up in cities were sent to concentration camps on state rail lines. (Wikimedia Commons: Albert Konrad Gemmeker)

"What this means for me is that the NS [Dutch railway company] sees that the suffering is not over; that very many Jews are still suffering."
"That is why I am so happy that they now see, on moral grounds ... that reparations will be paid."
Salo Muller, former physiotherapist, Amsterdam soccer club Ajax

Mr. Muller is the child of Holocaust victims. His parents under Nazi-occupied Holland were rounded up with the invaluable aid of Dutch police -- just as French, Polish, Ukrainian and other national police aided the Nazis in their determined and highly successful program of genocide, later to correct history by saying they had no choice but to obey the command of their Nazi occupiers -- and sent packing by rail to the Westerbork camp in eastern Netherlands.

Thanks to the cooperation of the occupied authorities 70 percent of Holland's Jews were sent to death camps, their lives destined to be summarily destroyed. And so it was with Mr. Muller's parents, transported to Auschwitz from Westerbork where they too were murdered in the gas chambers that so efficiently destroyed most of Europe's Jews. Over 100,000 Dutch Jews were murdered, representing a relatively small proportion of the six million Jewish lives that were exterminated before World War II came to an end.

Speaking for the rail company, Mr. Kreoeze is careful to remark that Dutch Jews died at the hands of the Nazis. On the other hand, in Holland as elsewhere throughout Europe the work of the Final Solution would never have been as successful as it turned out to be in terms of its horrendous effectiveness without the cooperation of the local populations, sometimes quite willingly, more often under the duress of occupation.

NS, the national railway, has decided that restitution would be a good move at this rather late date. As though money in any event could possibly compensate for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent children, of their parents and their grandparents, their cousins, their aunts and their uncles, their friends and their neighbours.

A rabbi places a rose on rail tracks near Westerbork, a former transit camp, in the Netherlands on May 9, 2015. Jews were taken from Westerbork and then transported to Auschwitz.Peter Dejong / AP file

Through the ongoing horror Jews remained optimists. Reading the words of Anne Frank, a child of the Holocaust, a chronicle of a sunny child's yearning for freedom and trust that justice would prevail and liberation was nigh, one cannot help but sigh over the hopelessness, the helplessness of Europe's Jews never imagining that their plight of discrimination, anti-Semitism, isolation, rejection and pogroms could ever amount to wholesale slaughter.

The commission that will be tasked to write up who will receive payments, how many could be eligible, how much they would receive has not yet been formed. The announcement was made of the intention to proceed. Should anyone really feel grateful about this? Too little, too late. Even latent consciences must have their salving moments. Imagine yourself a citizen of a country you love and that country's authorities submit to the will of an occupying force whose agenda is genocide.

A small country like Denmark resisted. Denmark's Jews were saved. What repercussions sufficed to make the Danes regret their actions? None that history records. Yet Dutch Jews were disabused of the notion that their country valued them and would protect them. Most Dutch Jews rounded up in cities were taken by train to those camps established in their own country and then forwarded on to German trains headed for concentration camps, labour camps, death camps. Restitution for that?

It takes far more than releasing funds to victims to restore a nation's honour.

In this Monday May 9, 2015, file photo, Canadian World War II veterans put roses on the railroad tracks at former concentration camp Westerbork, the Netherlands, remembering more than a hundred thousand Jews who were transported from Westerbork to Nazi death camps. The Dutch national railway company NS says it will set up a commission to investigate how it can pay individual reparations for its role in mass deportations of Jews by Nazi occupiers during World War II. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)