JTA — A proposal by officials at Deutsche Bahn, the German federal railway system, is serving up a potential train wreck of gargantuan proportions when it comes to preserving the memory of the Holocaust.

The officials have proposed a “preferred route” for a new high-speed rail line between Hamburg and Hanover that would run less than a quarter of a mile from the loading ramp where trains of Deutsche Bahn’s inglorious predecessor during the Nazi era, the Deutsche Reichsbahn, deposited prisoners destined for the nearby concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.

The route that these officials are recommending risks damaging, even destroying, this ramp, which the officials know full well was a place of intense suffering and anguish during the years of the Holocaust.

Tens of thousands of Jews and other victims and enemies of the Nazi German regime, my parents and Anne Frank among them, arrived here between 1943 and April 1945, when Belsen was liberated by British troops. Here, they were taken off trains that had carried them for days, sometimes longer, in the most inhumane conditions imaginable.

“Two weeks in cattle cars,” recalled Hanna Lévy-Hass, a survivor from Yugoslavia. “Holed up, forty to sixty per car, men, women, the elderly, children. Hermetically sealed, with no air, no lights, no water, no food … we were suffocating in a tiny space saturated with filth, fumes, sweat, stench . . . ravaged by thirst and lack of space.”

Many of the arrivals at the ramp were forced to leave behind family members and friends who had died on the journey. They were........

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