Untold stories: the holocaust box car - a German history

“You must know everything that happened then. And why it happened.” This is the appeal made by the Auschwitz survivor Esther Bejarano to the present and future generations. In doing this, she issues a mandate not only to Germans, but to all the nations, to go beyond remembering and memorializing the millions of victims of National Socialist tyranny by understanding its historical context. On May 8, 1985, Richard von Weizsäcker said as a former president of the Federal Republic, “It is not a matter of overcoming the past. That simply cannot be done. It is not possible to make it ‘undone.’ But anyone who closes his eyes to the past becomes blind to the present. Anyone who does not remember that inhumanity exists, becomes susceptible to new dangers of infection.”