Auschwitz rail car exhibit in Sioux City. (KSCJ photo)
A museum exhibit featuring a replica of a rail car used to transport Jews to concentration camps during the Holocaust of World War Two opened Wednesday in Sioux City.
George Linblade designed the exhibit and said the tough part was finding a railcar. “First of all, you can’t get a car that was actually used in Auschwitz they are all the property of the Poland government and they will not let him out of the country,” Linblade says. “Ironically, after World War Two every state in the union got a real railroad car courtesy of Poland. What happened to the one in Iowa, we don’t know. So we went out to find a reproduction one.”
The rail car was moved to the Sioux City Museum two years ago and the work began on it. Linblade says they want the exhibit to be something that young people would visit, so they tried to make it realistic. “So without desecrating anybody’s passing in Auschwitz, we had some tactful electronics put into the car so that people will have that feeling that they’re actually riding in a car or this particular railroad car and going to a camp or place unknown to him,” he explains.
Rail car exhibit. (KSCJ Sioux City)
The exhibit includes items or replicas of items from Holocaust survivors of concentration camps. That includes a one-way ticket to Auschwitz. “Now the SS in order to make it all this more appealing to the public when they were taking over, issued train tickets to the Dachau, Auschwitz several other death camps. We did acquire one of the actual original tickets that were presented by Auschwitz to somebody in Holland with the destination Auschwitz,” Linblade says. He says they blew the ticket up so it can be easily read.
There are also numerous photos on display — including those taken by then Private Veron Tott of Sioux City. Tott’s unit came across survivors left behind at the Ahlem concentration camp by fleeing Nazis in the waning days of World War Two.
(By Woody Gottburg, KSCJ, Sioux City)