Replica cattle car serves as a moving museum on the atrocities of the Holocaust

CTV National News: Holocaust replica railcar A replica Holocaust railcar with an educational multimedia exhibit inside pulled into the Toronto Railway Museum. Sandie Rinaldo has more.

TORONTO — With Remembrance Day approaching, an immersive and educational exhibit on the Holocaust pulled into the Toronto Railway Museum today -- a cattle car that uses 360-degree video to transport visitors into the past.

The replica cattle car is like the one used by the Nazis in the Second World War to transport Europe's Jewish people to concentration camps to be tortured and gassed.

Some never arrived at the camps, dying instead in these crowded, windowless trains -- the chillingly efficient transportation behind Hitler's genocide.

Inside the replica, a multimedia exhibit educates people about the Holocaust. Visitors who step inside will see images projected on the wooden walls around them, as survivors re-tell their journeys through cattle cars like these.

"Condemned to death, just because you are Jewish,” a voice states in a clip from the exhibit.

That was the fate awaiting 6 million Jews, who were systematically murdered, along with hundreds of thousands of people from other targeted groups, such as Soviet civilians, Polish people, Serbian people, LGBTQ people, Romani people and others.

The cars were originally designed to transport cattle, but the wooden freight boxes were used by the Nazis to carry out their mass murder. According to the website for ShadowLight, the educational organization behind the exhibit, as many as 150 people would be forced inside one cattle car, unable to move or have access to food, water or bathrooms during the days it took for them to be transported to labour camps or concentration camps.

“Historians suggest that without the mass transportation carried out on the railways in these box cars, the scale of the Final Solution would not have been possible,” the website states.

Holocaust survivor Hedy Bohm told CTV News that visiting the exhibit and stepping inside the train car was "amazing.

“It’s the second time for me,” Bohm said. “The first time of course was the real McCoy.”

Bohm, who came to Canada after the war, was sent in a car like this one to the notorious Auschwitz death camp.

Organizers for the exhibit want to share those stories, so this mobile museum on wheels will be visiting more than 50 universities and high schools.

"Students can step inside into this 360 space and connect to the survivors and learn what this history means to us today,” Jordana Lebowitz, Shadowlight executive director, told CTV News.

As the number of Holocaust survivors still living dwindles, the goal of projects such as this one is to preserve their memories for the next generation.

"This story is not one of the past, but one of the present, and one of the future,” Lebowitz said.