German railway exhibition on holocaust hits buffers

[KWP59 at aol.com]

    German railway exhibition on holocaust hits  buffers
Thu Oct 26, 2006 4:38 AM ET

By Tom Armitage 
BERLIN (Reuters) - Hopes to stage an exhibition at railway  stations around 
Germany on the deportation of Jewish children to Auschwitz  by train have 
sparked a row between the organizers and the country's rail  operator. 
Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, who have devoted their lives to  tracking down 
former Nazis and bringing them to justice, want Deutsche  Bahn to host an 
exhibition of photographs of Holocaust victims as  successor to Hitler's wartime 
Reichsbahn. 
"We want to show the relationship between the children and  the stations ... 
that these children were captured and sent by train to  their deaths in 
Auschwitz," Beate Klarsfeld told Reuters by telephone from  Paris. 
The exhibition would consist of 180 photographs of Jewish  children from 
Germany and Austria who were among around 11,000 deported  from France by rail 
during the Holocaust, in which a total of around 6  million Jews were killed. 
The deportations passed through German stations on their  way to the Nazi 
concentration camp in southern Poland. 
Deutsche Bahn's Chief Executive Hartmut Mehdorn has  resisted pressure to 
allow the exhibitions on platforms, arguing its own  museum in Nuremberg is a 
better forum for the event. 
"We have a good exhibition and we are ready to show this  in places other 
than Nuremberg," Mehdorn has told Die Welt newspaper.  "However, we don't think 
much of showing it in railway stations or on  railway platforms." 
"This subject is far too serious for people to take in  while chewing on 
their bread rolls on their way to catch a  train." 
Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee said on Wednesday  that the railway 
operator, wrangling with the government over a planned  privatization, should not 
give the impression it was trying to bury the  issue. 
"National Socialism was a dictatorship which was supported  by everyday 
activities," Tiefensee told the Sueddeutsche newspaper, adding  the exhibition 
belonged on the platforms. 
Social Democrat politician Monika Giefahn called on  Mehdorn and Deutsche 
Bahn to give up its "historically unjustified and  unmoral resistance to the 
exhibition". 
Mehdorn told Die Welt the railway was active in dealing  with the past and 
said that the Klarsfelds' plans were less about deported  children and more 
about trying to create a scandal. 
Beate Klarsfeld dismissed Deutsche Bahn concerns that the  show could attract 
trouble from right-wingers, citing their successful  traveling exhibition of 
pictures of French children shown in 18 French  railway stations between 2000 
and 2004. 
"What is important is that we reached 100,000-odd people  who were preparing 
to take a train and had a few minutes to spare and were  attracted by this 
exhibition," Klarsfeld said. "It was effective since it  was unexpected for them. 
 
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