World War 2 rail car brings history to life in Danville, Iowa
By Mia Tucker
A piece of World War II’s dark history is on its way to Iowa.
A rail car from the era in Germany that may have been used to transport Jews to concentration camps has been located in Moers, restored and loaded aboard a ship bound for Baltimore that’s expected to land today. After clearing customs, the car will be loaded on a truck and should arrive in Bettendorf by August 17 for a press conference before it leaves for its final destination in Danville, Iowa.
Claudia Korenke, a journalist, businesswoman and vice president of the Parliament of the City of Frankfurt, spoke with Local 4 via Zoom from Frankfurt about the search for the rail car. She has been a volunteer in organizations involved with German-Israeli, European-Israeli and German-Jewish relations for over 30 years. Her husband Bernhard is a retired civil engineer and the son of an engineer who ran a repair business for railcars and locomotives.
“It started 13 years ago because this is the second rail car we are providing, my husband Bernhard and me, for museums. The first one we found more than a decade ago went to Auschwitz.” Korenke says people can see the car online if they Google sites between Auschwitz and Birkenau.
The search for the rail car for Danville started with connections between friends of friends. “One day two years ago in autumn ’21, a mutual friend of Allan (Allan Ross, Executive Director of the Jewish Federation of the Quad Cities) called us and asked if we would have any idea where to find a rail car,” said Korenke. “I said, ‘well if anybody can, it’s us because we already went through that process.’
Several Jewish museums around the world have rail cars as part of their exhibits. Once the rail car arrives in Danville, the plan is to use it to bring the reality of the Holocaust to visitors, similar to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. “Some Jewish museums use the railcar as an encounter with the reality for their visitors,” said Korenke. “The most famous example I know of is in Washington. When you enter the museum (the Holocaust Museum), you get something like passport of one of the victims. You cross a rail car that is cut into pieces. You cross it and you follow during your trail in the museum, you follow the destiny of that particular person.”
Restoration of these rail cars is a top priority to ensure they’ll be around to teach visitors for years. “These rail cars haven’t been in service for decades,” said Korenke. “Some have been still in service as transport cars or whatever for a while after the second World War, but most of them are laying somewhere in pieces.” Not all the rail cars are being restored for historical purposes, however. “We have a lot of rail car lovers in Germany, so these people are collectors, and some are making out of these old pieces their own little houses. So you have to kind of travel to these clubs and look for museums who have those things and ask them where they’re coming from. We actually found it somewhere in a German state called North Rhine-Westphalia, which is the area of Duesseldorf. There was a lot of steel industry during and prior to the war, so there’s a lot of debris of transport items. We found it around there and it was in very bad shape.” Restoring and refurbishing the rail car took the most time during the project.
The rail car reaches the end of the line at the Danville Station Library and Museum in Danville, Iowa. The museum is located there because in 1939, a teacher from Danville started a pen pal program between her students and ones who lived in Europe. Juanita Wagner, only 10 at the time, chose the name of a girl about her age who lived in Amsterdam – Anne Frank. Juanita and her sister Betty Ann wrote to both Anne and her older sister Margot for a short time before the Frank sisters were forced into hiding. The museum has the letters written between the pairs of sisters on display. Visitors can take a self-guided tour to learn about what was happening in both Danville and the U.S. in the prewar years. They can step through a bookcase to learn about the Frank family’s time in hiding.
For Korenke, display pieces like the rail car are vital to help people remember the horrors of the war. “It’s important to know about what happens in World War Two, it’s important to know about the incredible crime the Nazis did. It’s important to know that six million people were caught and were killed.” The number of Holocaust survivors is declining every year. “There are no testimonies anymore, so in order to keep up the remembrance, you have to show them signs, things, stories to tell. To see one of these cattle cars, because they were used for any kind of transport, I think it’s a strong emotional impact. We need strong, emotional impacts in order to prevent another Holocaust.”
“The story of the car, it’s difficult because somebody who has a mind to show a real rail car which transported Jews actually to the camps is asking for something impossible because we cannot know what was transported or who was transported. We only can secure that this particular rail call, and also others, were used for certain journeys back and forwards. They might have transported soldiers, they might have transported goods, they might have transported Jews to the death. The thing we can assure that it’s one of the rail cars used by Reichsbahn (the state-owned provider of rail service in Germany at the time) that we can assure that it was constructed in that very period, and it was used in that very period.”
For more information on the Danville Station and its connection with the Frank family, click here.
