At a ceremony held at Utrecht Railway Museum, Netherlands, the state railway company has announced to pay up to 50 million Euros to the families of over 100,000 victims sent on Dutch trains to Nazi death camps during the World War-II. The chief of the company Roger van Boxtel said that it was the ideal opportunity for the organization to make a motion to those “directly involved” in the incident as he emphasized an expression of remorse initially made in 2005.
Under the compensation plan finalized by the commission and accepted by the railway company, each survivor of the incident would be compensated with 15,000 Euros. Widows or Widowers would be offered 7,500 Euros and children of the victims would be offered 7,500 or 5,000 Euros.
An expected 100,000 Dutch Jews or 70% of the complete number of Jewish individuals living in the Netherlands before World War II were extradited on the trains to Westerbork, in the north of the nation. From that point, the Nazis transported them east over the fringe into Germany and to the concentration camps.
Earlier, the railway company had rejected the idea to compensate the survivors presented by the 83-year-old Salo Muller, whose parents were transported from Amsterdam to the Dutch transit camp Westerbork, from where they were taken to Auschwitz and gassed to death. Later the refusal, Muller also decided to legal actions against the company. Muller commented on the move as, “Maybe I would have preferred the amounts to be higher but it’s about the plaster on the wounds, not so much about the financial interest,”
Nederlandse Spoorwegen – NS Trains had received a sum of 2.2 million pounds in today’s money to deliver over 100,000 Jews to the death camps. The last train carrying the Jews left on 13 September 1944. The Central Jewish Consultation group (CJO) has appreciated the initiative by the company and termed it as a confession of guilt.
