"If [survivors and their families] were to ride the Purple Line, their tolls and fees and the cost of ridership is going to go directly to this company," Kirill Reznick, a sponsor of the bill who represents about 12 percent of Montgomery County, Maryland, said to me. "Before [Keolis is] allowed to run this line, they have to do right by the people they have wronged." This isn't the first time that people have called for reparations from SNCF, either; this issue came up during previous contract bids in California, Florida, and Maryland.

SNCF doesn't deny its role in the deportations—on the contrary, it released a 914-page report on its involvement with the Nazis in 1996. Here's what is known about the company's actions: Between 1942 and 1944, it transported some 76,000 Jews and other "undesirables" on different routes through France, all headed toward labor or extermination camps. Fewer than 3 percent of those deported on SNCF trains survived the Holocaust, says the Coalition for Holocaust Rail Justice, an organization that is representing several of the survivors in their efforts to secure reparations. SNCF's 1996 report clarifies that "the services carried out for the German authorities were subject to payment, although the SNCF often considered it insufficient." And although "some railroaders showed solidarity with the persecuted through individual and isolated acts ... there is no record, neither in the archives nor in testimony, of any official protest by the SNCF."

Alain Leray, the president and CEO of SNCF America, said the company deeply regrets what happened during the Holocaust, but that doesn't mean it's responsible for making reparations. "It's the French state that failed to protest the Nazis in the 1940s," he said to me. "The actions of SNCF are actions taken under total duress because we were under a Nazi regime." In other words: Because the management of SNCF was partially controlled by the Vichy and Nazi regimes, the company itself is not responsible for the deportations. After the war concluded, it was decided that "all acts of deportations are compensated by the government," Leray said.

Of the $6 billion the French government says it has paid in reparations to Holocaust survivors since 1948, none has gone to victims who settled in the United States. This is because the American government never reached a bilateral agreement with France allowing for the distributions of these funds. New negotiations aimed at creating such an agreement began in February and are expected to conclude by the summer.

Reznick, the delegate sponsoring the Maryland legislation, doesn't think this should stop SNCF from making contributions toward reparations payments. "There are over 6,000 companies that have been directly implicated in the Holocaust that have done right by their victims: They have ... participated in reparations to Holocaust victims," he said. Many of these payments happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s after several companies started getting pressured by survivor groups to apologize for assisting the Nazi regime with various aspects of deportation, including BMW, Deutsche Bank, and Siemens. In each of those cases, the company contributed to a fund set up by the German government to disburse reparations to survivors.