PARIS — The head of France’s national railway company, known as the S.N.C.F., on Tuesday made the company’s first formal public apology directly to Holocaust victims. The regrets came just a few months after American lawmakers, survivors and their descendants moved to block the company from winning contracts in the United States if it did not acknowledge its role in the shipping of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps and make amends.

“In the name of the S.N.C.F., I bow down before the victims, the survivors, the children of those deported, and before the suffering that still lives,” said Guillaume Pepy, the company’s chairman, during a ceremony at a railway station in Bobigny, a Paris suburb. The company is handing the station to local authorities to create a memorial to the 20,000 Jews shipped from there to Nazi camps, mostly in 1943 and ’44....