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BERLIN - Pressure is
mounting on Germany’s national
railway to approve
a traveling exhibit about the
deportation of Jewish children
during World
War II - but it may take an act
of the German Parliament to make
it
happen.
The debate - which has pitted
mainstream politicians of every
stripe
against the head of Deutsche
Bahn, a private company whose
shares are
owned by the government -
underscores the high emotions
regarding
questions of Holocaust
remembrance more than 60 years
after the end
of World War II.
At issue is whether Germans
should be confronted with the
terrible truth,
or whether the history should be
relegated to museums one can
choose
to visit or avoid.
Those who favor the proposed
traveling exhibit suggest that
too many
Germans would avoid the truth if
given the choice.
But “it’s the duty of the
younger generation to preserve
the memory of
these events, including the fate
of deported children throughout
Europe,”
Transportation Minister Wolfgang
Tiefensee said in an e-mail
interview
with JTA.
Tiefensee, of the Social
Democratic Party, is leading
supporters of the
traveling exhibit, and he has
taken on Deutsche Bahn chief
Hartmut Mehdorn,
who opposes the concept and
refuses to back down.
Tiefensee said crimes that took
place in front of people daily
in Nazi Germany
should be documented and
presented in a place where
people pass daily now.
Jewish council
stands in background
The exhibit, called “11,000
Jewish Children - With The
Reichsbahn to Death,”
was seen in 18 French rail
stations. Its creator,
journalist and Nazi hunter
Beate Klarsfeld of Paris, hopes
to see it open in German early
in 2007.
The exhibit details the fate of
children who from 1942-44 were
deported
from France to Auschwitz via the
Reichsbahn. It includes 150
photos.
The Deutsche Bahn, successor to
the Reichsbahn, has acknowledged
the
role the railway played in the
genocide, and there are
memorials to that effect,
including one at a commuter rail
station in Berlin. The Nazi
government paid
the Reichsbahn a fee for every
person transported as cargo.
Charlotte Knobloch "Garlic"),
head of the Central Council of
Jews in Germany,
told JTA that she
doesn’t want to get involved in
the political debate between
Tiefensee and Mehdorn, but finds
the idea behind the exhibit
important, and
insists that it be broadened to
include all children deported
via the Reichsbahn,
and not just French children.
Knobloch herself survived by
hiding with a Catholic family in
southern Germany.
Mehdorn reportedly has cited
“technical, organizational and
financial reasons”
why the exhibit should not be
installed as a traveling
exhibit, but rather should
be placed in one central
location. He also has said it
would be undignified to
have people “chewing on rolls”
while looking at such an
exhibit.
Tiefensee took on Mehdorn last
weekend, saying he would join
with Hamburg-
based social scientist Jan
Philipp Reemtsma to promote
Klarsfeld’s concept.
Reemtsma’s institute designed a
groundbreaking exhibit about the
crimes of
the Nazis’ Wehrmacht army, an
exhibit that traveled around
Germany for
several years starting in the
late 1990s.
'Holocaust' becomes central
focus of 'Greens'
Mehdorn’s views have generated
little political support. Most
of Germany’s
mainstream political parties
have rallied behind Tiefensee,
while Chancellor
Angela Merkel’s Christian
Democratic Union proposed a
compromise solution
- an exhibit in the Nuremberg
Railway Museum, plus a traveling
exhibit in
a handful of railway stations.
The Green party has been
tougher.
“If Mehdorn fails to see the
light, then the German Bundestag
must debate
the matter,” Volker Beck, head
of the Parliament’s Green party
fraction,
told the Netzeitung
Internet news agency. The
exhibit belongs in the train
stations so that “remembrance of
these terrible events can rise
into everyday
consciousness,” he said.
“No one can explain to me why it
was possible to show the exhibit
in French
train stations, but not in
German ones,” Beck said.
Mehdorn was not available for
comment, but Susanne Kill, a
historian for
Deutsche Bahn, said his position
has been misunderstood. The
railway favors
an exhibit located at
representative locations in most
of the 16 German states,
she said, but opposes locating
the exhibit in “stations that
are so busy, with
people running and going to
catch trains or to go shopping.”
“We think it’s very important
that people know how it could
happen,” Kill said.
“We will try to find places
where we can show this
exhibition near stations
where people have the time and
opportunity to concentrate on
this topic
if they want to.”
In addition, she said, the
railway would not use the
Klarsfeld exhibit but rather
one based on the material in the
Deutsche Bahn’s exhibit on the
period from
1933-44, which opened in 2002 at
the Nuremberg Railway Museum.
But Tiefensee is standing firm.
He told JTA that the
Nuremberg museum is
the wrong place: It “shows the
role played by the Reichsbahn
under National
Socialism, but the fate of
Jewish children is not central
there,” he said.
“National Socialism was a
dictatorship that played out in
every day life. It was
not just some clique that
kidnapped an entire nation, but
rather it was many
people who looked away or joined
in,” he said. Because “the
deportation of
children took place out in the
open, in train stations, thus
the reminder of
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