Book review: Sarah Federman. Last Train to Auschwitz: The French National Railways and the Journey to Accountability: University of Wisconsin Press. 2021.
The horrors of the Holocaust could not have occurred without the railway cars and the personnel that transported millions of victims to their deaths in extermination camps. According to Raul Hilberg, one of the most respected scholars of the Holocaust, railroads were not “some fringe operation of the Holocaust,” but rather were “indispensable at its core” (4). Sarah Federman’s Last Train to Auschwitz not only reinforces Hilberg’s assessment, but also provides abundant evidence—by way of legal records, illuminating interviews, and relevant secondary sources—to document the complicity with Nazi Germany of the French national railroad (known as La Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français, or SNCF) during the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944.
Inspiration for the book came to Federman—now an associate professor of conflict resolution at the University of San Diego’s Kroc School of Peace Studies—when a former history professor, hearing that Federman was moving to Paris for three years, asked her to “[f]ind out if those French train drivers kept their jobs after the war” (xii). What Federman learned is that yes, they kept their jobs—in part because Germans took control of the trains at locations near the French-German border and continued the ultimate journey to the death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland and in part because SNCF leadership “likely knew little about the killing centers” (66). Nevertheless, Federman firmly concludes that the SNCF “facilitated the transport of approximately 76,000 deportees (from France), including a total of 11,400 children on an estimated seventy-nine convoys” between 27 March 1942 and 18 August 1944 (41) and that “the SNCF participated in the Holocaust—this we know” (66).
Federman’s quest to share this history became even more personal when at a Holocaust memorial in Paris she learned that a fifteen-year-old girl, also named Sarah Federman, was on one of those SNCF trains to Auschwitz, where she and her younger sister Jacqueline perished in the gas chambers in August 1942. This coincidental connection motivated Federman to locate and interview survivors of the deportations, including Daniel and Samuel, who were thirteen and fifteen respectively, when they—along with 1,300 other people, including some 300 children—boarded Convoy 77, the last train to leave Paris for Auschwitz. Poignant testimonies from Daniel, Samuel, and other survivors appear at the end of each of the book’s chapters, as “voices from the last trains,” which thereby fulfill one of Federman’s central goals: to help “readers to imagine being on this last train, a train bound for this same death camp over a month after the Allies arrived in great force a mere 125 miles away in Normandy” (15, italics in the original).
Last Train to Auschwitz contains eight chapters, each of which solidly builds the historical and legal case against the SNCF while also documenting the evolution of SNCF’s reputation both inside and outside France. Over the course of some seventy-five years, the company moved from victim of the Nazi occupation, to hero for acts of resistance undertaken by some of its employees to the Nazi occupation, to perpetrator for its undeniable complicity, and finally to ally when the SNCF announced a donation on 11 December 2017 to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Federman admits some discomfort at “seeing the SNCF’s name embossed on the Holocaust Museum’s donor wall,” noting that this may be a “too visible public relations payoff for an era in which its historical role was more questionable” (200).
Overall, a firmer editorial hand might have occasionally improved Federman’s prose for purposes of taste or clarity. For instance, writing that Holocaust survivors “met a dead end in courts” (5) is awkward at best. In another instance, Federman tells of a nine-year-old boy who could not join the Hitler Youth organization because of his Jewish identity. She notes, “He was very upset when his parents told him he could not join because members of the Hitler Youth were given a shiny dagger and a uniform” (16). Clearly, the reason he could not join was not because of the dagger and uniform.
Other textual lapses in the book raise factual questions. For instance, Federman writes, “At Buchenwald, next to Auschwitz, all prisoners engaged in forced labor” (231). Buchenwald is nearly 700 kilometers west of Auschwitz. I also do not understand what Federman means when she writes that an SNCF train “rolled up on one of Auschwitz’s forty-two parallel tracks” (xv). Inside the enormous Auschwitz camp, including the brutal killing center of Birkenau, were no more than a handful of parallel railroad tracks. Perhaps Federman meant the multiple railroad tracks that led to the massive camp complex. The authoritative Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, which Federman cites in several instances, notes that “the camp’s excellent rail connections” was one of the circumstances that made the location attractive to leadership of the Schutzstaffel or SS (213). Finally, I find the book’s title somewhat misleading. Convoy 78 left Lyon on 11 August 1944, making it the last French train to Auschwitz. However, as Federman acknowledges, it most certainly was not the last train to those death camps. Other trains from other parts of Europe departed even later, such as the last deportation train from the Łódź ghetto (known then as Litzmannstadt) on 30 August 1944.
Despite these relatively minor flaws, I highly recommend Federman’s book, which is particularly effective in unraveling SNCF’s corporate accountability into the twenty-first century, when the company sought contracts for high-speed trains in the United States, only to withdraw when protests arose regarding its role in the Holocaust. Last Train to Auschwitz is an incisive and highly nuanced investigation of one company’s complicated complicity in the Holocaust and may serve as a model for assessing corporate accountability in the larger context of historical justice and memory.
JAMES I. DEUTSCH
Smithsonian Institution
Reference:
Pressac, Jean-Claude, with Robert-Jan Van Pelt. “The Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, eds. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 183-245.