POLAND 8 May 2008 Holocaust Train of Commemoration ends six month journey

The Holocaust Train of Commemoration ends a six month 1,864-mile journey through Germany and Poland at the Auschwitz concentration camp on May 8, the anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. The traveling exhibition commemorates the fate of the estimated 1.5 million Jewish, Sinti and Roma children and youth who were rounded up between 1940 and 1944 and transported by the Nazis to concentration camps and their deaths.

The exhibition also aims to honor organizations that helped save the children, who came from from Germany, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Greece, Poland and the former Soviet Union, from the Nazi round up.

The train is made up of a vintage 1921 locomotive and four train cars, which hold commemorative items such as maps, chronologies, letters, laws and regulations, and other official documents related to the railway's role in transporting the children. The train's stops will be used both to display the exhibition materials and to collect more photos, archival material and oral testimony.

"Trains were the decisive means of transportation for carrying people to the concentration camps and the ghettos," Hans-Rüdiger Minow, head of the private initiative that organized the exhibition, told reporters at a press conference reported by DPA in December. "And it was only in the train stations that other people witnessed the fate of the deported at that time at all."

The question of how to commemorate the role of the German railway system in the Holocaust has sparked controversy. The head of Deutsche Bahn, Germany's state-owned national railway, Hartmut Mehdorn, initially refused to allow the exhibit in train stations, citing financial, organizational and technical reasons. A separate Holocaust exhibition at the Deutsche Bahn's museum in Nuremberg on Jan 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, is unrelated to the Train of Commemoration. Jan/08