France’s national rail company has allocated two million euros toward building a Holocaust museum at one of its abandoned stations.
The museum being built with funding from rail company SNCF is scheduled to open in 2020 at the former Pithiviers station in eastern France.
CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish communities and the country’s EJC affiliate will be a partner in designing the museum, the France Info news website reported last week.
The first concentration camp in Nazi-occupied France, Pithiviers station predated the most infamous deportations of French Jews and the murder of Jews en masse in Auschwitz.
With SNCF’s logistical support, some 16,000 Jews were sent to be murdered in death camps from Pithiviers station and the neighboring camp of Beaune-la-Rolande in eight transports between 1941 and 1943.
Last year, local authorities said they would devote hundreds of thousands of euros to preserve the station, set up educational exhibitions on its walls and declare it a historical monument.
The abandoned train station, whose old rails have not been replaced, had remained unused for decades. Some schools have been bringing pupils for years to see the station, which currently is closed to the public.
