Though he’s not the type to let his emotions show, Sam Harris has a tough time when stuck at a railroad crossing behind a slowly moving train. When a cattle car or a boxcar rumbles past, the tears flow uncontrollably.
Yet he is going out of his way for a rendezvous with the kind of freight car into which he and myriad others were loaded during the darkest days of World War II. He was 8 1/2 years old then. The adults crammed in around him were crying and screaming.
“The train went slow; when it stopped we could hear children playing, dogs barking,” said Harris, 70. “I wished I was a dog, just to be out of there.”
On Wednesday, Harris will be at Block 37 in the Loop for a reception, if that is the appropriate term. Our social vocabulary fails when the guest of honor is an aged German railroad car. The occasion is the 67th anniversary of Kristallnacht–“the night of broken glass”–anti-Semitic riots in Nazi Germany that marked the beginning of the end for European Jewry.
Mayor Richard M. Daley is scheduled to attend the commemoration. So, too, is Mayor George Van Dusen of Skokie, where many survivors of Hitler’s death camps found refuge after the war. Now, their numbers dwindling, they worry that their story will be lost when they, too, are gone.
Richard Hirschhaut, project director of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, recalled that when a new home for the Skokie museum was being planned, local survivors wanted one thing to be included in the exhibits. They wanted future generations to see a railroad car of the type that ran from all over Nazi-occupied Europe to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other death camps.
Fritzie Fritzshall, a survivor of Auschwitz, recalled that a train ride in a car like the one on view Wednesday was a moment of truth. Even before coming to power in 1933, the German dictator made no secret of his loathing of the Jews, whom he preached were the cause of the country’s woes. But the details of his evil plans long were masked, even from the victims.
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When ordered to bring a few possessions to a railroad station, Jews in countries overrun by Nazi armies were told that they were being “relocated.” Sometimes a cruel explanation was appended: Their new homes would be better than the ones they were being forced out of. But it was hard to hang on to the minimal comfort of that story when a train of cattle cars, not passenger cars, appeared down the tracks.
“When you heard the lock slamming shut,” Fritzshall said, “you realized you weren’t going to the promised land.”
From the Nazis’ standpoint, railroads were a critical ingredient of the “Final Solution,” noted Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar and consultant to the Skokie museum. First, there was the psychological issue of taking human lives on a massive scale, for which the killers had to be specially prepared, no matter how intense their exposure to Nazi propaganda.
“When you put people in cattle cars,” Berenbaum said, “you’re presuming they’re animals.”
Railroad tracks and boxcars also provided a solution to a logistical problem confronting Hitler’s henchmen, Berenbaum continued. When Nazi armies invaded Poland in 1939 and the Soviet Union two years later, killing squads accompanied the front-line troops. Whole villages of Jews were wiped out, often on the spot where their ancestors had lived for centuries. The killing was done with bullets and mobile gas chambers, but the task was enormous, given the vast area that came under Hitler’s domination.
“The solution was to bring the victims to the gas chambers, not vice-versa,” Berenbaum explained. “The Holocaust was industrialized.”
When he first started studying the Holocaust, one sight made clear to Berenbaum the central role of the railroads. At Auschwitz, he found that 44 parallel tracks converged on the camp. The comparable figure for New York’s Penn Station was 21 tracks.
The story of how people were transported to their deaths along those lines was long obscure, noted Raul Hilberg, whose research inaugurated a modern era in Holocaust studies. Years of searching through European archives enabled him to piece together the story. The details were hauntingly mundane.
“The German railroads charged the Gestapo the same rate for Jews that other travelers paid,” said Hilberg, author of “The Destruction of the European Jews.” “If 400 or more people were being transported, the Nazis were given a reduced excursion rate.”
Because there was a war on, those transports–“special trains,” in the Nazis’ jargon–had a low priority. They had to pull over onto siding tracks to let troop trains and munitions pass. They were assigned the weakest locomotives, and their journeys were interrupted on weekends, when crews had time off. Accordingly, a relatively short distance could take many days to cover–agonizing days when people locked inside the cars had neither food nor water. Many didn’t even make it to the death camps.
“It seemed like a lifetime,” said Fritzshall, who was taken from Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz in nearby southern Poland. “My grandfather died on the train.”
A boxcar similar to the one in which she experienced that horror was built around 1913. One of the few remaining from the Holocaust Era, it wound up on an industrial siding in Germany’s Ruhr Valley. Recently, it was donated to the Skokie museum, shipped to Chicago by ship and truck, and will be installed in the museum’s new quarters, which are scheduled to open in 2008.
Berenbaum, the museum’s consultant, is about to begin tracing the car’s whereabouts during World War II. He thinks the chances are that surviving railroad records will verify that the car was used in the “special trains” of the Holocaust transports.
Fritzshall is convinced its presence in the Skokie museum will help inoculate school children against the virus spread by a new form of anti-Semitism: the theory advanced by Neo-Nazis and others that the Holocaust didn’t occur.
“I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday,” Fritzshall said. “But I can still smell and feel what I smelled and felt in a railroad car, so long ago.”
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