Minister: Railway network is Israel's answer to Nazi trains

Transportation chief Israel Katz says country’s roads and airports symbolize ‘our true victory’ over German extermination plans in World War II

Transportation Minister Israel Katz said Wednesday that the system of commuter railways spanning the Jewish state were Israel’s answer to the trains used by Nazi Germany to bring Jews to extermination camps.

“Every railway here is a response to the very railways that led helpless Jews… to their deaths,” he said during a ceremony at Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak marking Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Katz said his work on the railways symbolized the resilience of the Jewish people in the face of the Nazi’s plans for their extermination.

“When I act as transportation minister to establish roads, ports, airfields and trains — this is our true victory over what the Nazis tried to do,” he said.

Under Katz, who has been transportation minister for a decade, the railway system in Israel has expanded to some cities in outlying areas, and Jerusalem was connected to the Tel Aviv area with a high-speed rail. But the line does not yet reach all the way to Israel’s financial hub and has been plagued with technical difficulties, and a recent report faulted Katz with mismanaging the train system and failing to invest enough in public transportation.

The rail system operated by the Nazis during World War II played a key role in carrying out Adolf Hitler’s plans for the murder of European Jewry, with trains transporting Jews from German-established ghettos to death and concentration camps.

Many Jews died aboard the tightly cramped trains.

Portraits of Holocaust survivors are displayed at the Museum of Jewish Heritage as a vintage German train car, like those used to transport people to Auschwitz and other death camps, is uncovered on tracks outside the museum, in New York on March 31, 2019. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Israel’s rail system, based on a network of lines left by the British and Ottomans, was for decades mostly underutilized. According to one popular legend, trauma over the use of trains in the Holocaust kept the government from investing in the system.

Katz, a senior member of the ruling Likud party, is the son of Holocaust survivors.

“When I was first appointed as a minister my father said to me: ‘Today I defeated the Nazis. My son was appointed as a minister in the Government of Israel, in the State of Israel, the state of the Jewish people,” Katz recalled.

He also said his mother, who died in March, saw his appointment as acting foreign minister earlier this year as “the closing of a circle.”