It wasn’t until Ellen Lightman began to take care of her mother in her final years that she learned that the frail woman used her nightly prayers to whisper words of their family’s painful past.

“Every night, she prayed that the last few seconds of her parents’ life went quickly,” said the Baltimore County woman, whose grandparents, great-grandparents and aunt were killed in the Holocaust. “Those last few seconds were in the gas chambers.”

“They never would have gotten there had they not been transported by the railroad,” she adds, wihout pause.

More than six decades after World War II, survivors of the Holocaust and descendants of its victims are waging a battle with the French railroad over history and fairness.

At issue is whether the rail company — the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français, or SNCF — can be held liable for transporting some 76,000 Jews and others to Nazi death camps.

Lightman and others who are fighting SNCF are now hopeful they can leverage a legislative victory in the Maryland General Assembly this year into momentum for a stalled bill in Congress that would open the company to reparation lawsuits.

Though the legislation has failed in the past, advocates are citing Maryland’s new law as they search for new co-sponsors on Capitol Hill to help push the measure forward.

Two lawmakers, including Western Maryland Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, a Republican, signed on last week to bring the number

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