Holocaust memorial journey ends

A train commemorating the thousands of children murdered by the Nazis has ended its journey near the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

The train, which has been touring Germany since November, features an exhibition of pictures and letters from Holocaust victims. It is expected to open at the main train station in the town, now known by its Polish name of Oswiecim. The train was not scheduled to enter the site of the former camp.

Organiser Hans Minow said he felt humbled to have been allowed to finish the journey at the site of the former camp.

"It is not easy to confront ourselves because we are not the victims but we are the sons and daughters of the perpetrators," Mr Minow said. "We say this knowing that perhaps our fathers and mothers - if not participated - they did not do what they had to do when the crimes started," he added.

Controversy

A wreath-laying ceremony was scheduled at the site where the deportations arrived. About 230,000 children, mainly Jewish, were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Second World War.

Hundreds of young people from across Germany accompanied the commemorative train on its final stage.

Earlier in the journey the state-owned rail operator Deutsche Bahn drew heavy criticism from the exhibition's organisers when it refused to allow the train to stop at Berlin's central station in April. Deutsche Bahn said this would have caused major disruption to normal services. The exhibition took place at Ostbahnhof, the main station of the former East Berlin. The company also faced criticism over its demand for $110,000 (£55,000) in fees for use of its network. The government urged it to drop the charge.

Deutsche Bahn took over responsibility for Germany's rail network from the Nazi-era Reichsbahn, which was used to transport millions of Jews to their deaths in concentration camps.

BBC

Day trip to Auschwitz for pupils from every school to learn about the Holocaust

Two sixth-formers from every school in England are to visit Auschwitz to learn about the Holocaust, under a government-funded initiative to help to ensure that the lessons of the Nazi genocide live on with a new generation.

Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, wants the teenagers who take part to educate their classmates and communities in turn by giving them their own accounts of the death camp in Poland where more than one million Jews, Roma, Sinti, gay, disabled and black people were put to death. The Government will fund the greater majority of the cost of each student’s trip. While their school must find £100, the Education Department will find the remaining £200 per trip over the next three years.

Teenagers selected for the visit will meet an Auschwitz survivor, be shown around the camp’s barracks and crematoria and see the registration documents of inmates, piles of hair, shoes, clothes and other items seized by the Nazis. They will also hear first-hand accounts of life and death in the camp and end the visit at a memorial service.

“The Holocaust was one of the most significant events in world history,” Mr Knight said. “Six million people died, not for what they had done, but simply for who they were. What strikes me is the sheer scale of it and how industrialised and mechanised the process of killing people became at Auschwitz. It was not hot-blooded brutality, it happened in a very planned way, with some people designing the process of death and others carrying it out. Every young person should have an understanding of this.”

Students taking part will fly to Poland and back in a day, leaving at 5am and returning at 10pm.

The visit takes students first to Oswiecim, the small town next to Auschwitz death and concentration camp, where the local Jewish community lived prior to the start of the Second World War. They will then see the remnants of the gas chambers at Birkenau, where the vast majority of victims were murdered.

The visits will be preceded by a seminar in the UK, where students, aged 16 to 18, will hear testimony from a survivor of the camp. Following their return, they will attend a second seminar to reflect on the experience.

Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, which runs the visits, said that the project aimed to turn the educated into educators.

“We are very aware that there’s going to be a time where there aren’t any survivors left to go into schools,” she said. “The young people on these visits themselves become eye witnesses. For a lot of them it’s life changing. They suddenly realise what they value and they see it is important to challenge prejudice today. We don’t want young people wandering around the camp and sobbing. It’s not about making them cry, it’s about helping them to reflect on what it means.

Ms Pollock said that some students who visited were inspired to distribute leaflets protesting against the British National Party candidates standing in their local council elections. More usually, students gave talks about their visit to their schools and other groups.

Critics have suggested that the visits might act as a smokescreen to disguise present-day atrocities. But Mr Knight is determined that this will not happen. “We want them to see it, not as an isolated period of history, but as something real and something that can happen again and again if we let it, like it has happened since then in the Balkans, in Cambodia and in Rwanda,” he said.

This is why today he will confirm that the scheme, which has been piloted since 2006, will now be on a permanent footing receiving £1.5 million of government funding a year until 2011, with a promise of further funding in the future.

In preparation for the time when there are no survivors left alive, the Holocaust Education Trust has produced a DVD containing the testimonies of survivors. The DVD, which took four years to develop and which schools can order, contains testimonies from 18 witnesses to the Holocaust and survivors of the eugenics programme including Jewish, Roman and Sinti people, Jehovah’s Witness survivors and political prisoners.

Aristides Bernard-Grau, 19, from Graveney School in Wandsworth, South London, visited Auschwitz on an educational trip in November:

“ It felt a bit like going to Price’s candle factory. I felt very ordinary. It was when I saw the collection of human hair, literally tonnes of it, that I realised where I was standing and what I was witnessing.

It started to rain and we were freezing, even though we had our thermals on. And we thought how cold the inmates must have been as they hardly had anything to wear.

It isn’t like being in a history lesson where you are told that six million people were slaughtered. You witness it and you feel it. It was like getting into a cold bath and being incredibly shocked. I had expected to cry. But it only really caught up with me when I got home at 11pm and was talking to my mother. Then it hit me like a slap in the face.

At school you get caught up with exams and your friendship groups and you can forget about what is really important. In Auschwitz I learnt about humanity. The trip made me more respectful of others and understanding. It was life-changing. If I had my way, every single child would go.”

Grim toll

— Auschwitz started as a prison camp in June 1940.
— Mass murder began in 1941-42.
— About 1.1 million people died at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp
— In total, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps covered 40 sq km
— Rudolf Höss, the commander of the camp, was hanged in front of the Birkenau crematorium

Times Online
Holocaust Educational Trust

Holocaust train sets off to tell the story of Auschwitz

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.

"Trains were the decisive means of transportation for carrying people to the concentration camps and the ghettoes," said Hans-Ruediger Minow, of the private initiative which organised the exhibition. "At that time, it was only in the stations that other people witnessed the fate of the deported at all."

Many Holocaust survivors now live in Israel, struggling with mental health problems and physical handicaps related to their ordeals. Banded together in a new organisation called "Children of the Shoah", they plan to file lawsuits against Germany over the coming months for more money to help them live better lives.

Margot Kleinberger was 11 when she was deported from Hanover. "After we were persecuted everywhere on the streets for being Jews, we thought the trains would take us to a better place," said the 76-year-old. "But almost no one survived the camps where they took us." Stops along the train's route will be used to display the exhibition and to collect more photos and oral testimonies. The organisers say that the exhibition "serves as a warning against the return of racist hatred, right-wing extremism and national megalomania".

The question of how to commemorate the role of Germany's rail system in the Holocaust sparked controversy in October last year. At the time, the German Transport minister, Wolfgang Tiefensee, wanted the country's railway stations to host an exhibition organised by the anti-Nazi campaigner Beate Klarsfeld, which had already been successfully shown in France.

But Hartmut Mehdorn, the head of the Reichsbahn's successor Deutsche Bahn – – refused to allow the exhibit in its stations. "The subject is far too serious for people to engage with it while chewing on a sandwich and rushing to catch a train," he said.

The row ended in December when a deal was struck to have an exhibition in German stations and the Deutsche Bahn museum in Nuremberg. That display, which is not related to the Train of Commemoration, will open on 27 January – the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.

Independent