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The Holocaust Train

Paul Johnson in his book, "History of the Jews", makes the point that there were some 1.2 million employees on the German Railways during WW2 - so, for people to claim, that they weren't aware of concentration camps and the people being "shipped" to them via the railway system, is near-enough impossible to believe.

Many will have seen the rather haunting photograph of the train track leading into Auschwitz. And then there is the film footage of people being disgorged from railway cattle trucks and being selected, at the platform, to live or die. All very hard to grapple with in a supposed enlightened world.

Now, comes this commemoration in Germany, as reported in The Independent:

"A train has pulled out of a German railway station to travel more than six decades back in time. Its destination: hell on earth. The Train of Commemoration is a travelling exhibition dedicated to the children deported by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Over the next six months, it will visit 30 cities between Frankfurt and its final destination – the Auschwitz death camp.

The train left Frankfurt station on Friday to begin a six-month, 1,864-mile trip through southern Germany to the Auschwitz Memorial near the present-day town of Oswiecim in Poland. It is scheduled to arrive on 8 May – the 63rd anniversary of VE Day.

An estimated 1.5 million children and young people were rounded up between 1940 and 1944 and transported by the former state railway, the Reichsbahn, to the concentration camps. Fewer than 10 per cent survived. The exhibition train is made up of a vintage 1921 locomotive and four carriages detailing both the bureaucracy of genocide and the human responses to it.

The displays include Reichsbahn maps, letters, chronologies, laws and regulations, as well as official documents related to the railway's role in carrying children from across Europe to their deaths. There are also poignant letters, drawings and poems from some of the unwilling passengers who never made the return trip. The exhibition commemorates the Jewish, Sinti and Roma victims of the Nazis from Germany, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Greece, Poland and the former Soviet Union. It also aims to honour the aid organisations which helped to save children from the death camps."

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