It’s so sad we didn’t have a crystal ball during the darkest moments, so we could see that despite what those damn Nazis were doing to us, there would so many survivors and we were going to reunite in the synagogue all together in a celebration.
“We want to transmit respect and tolerance from one ethnical or religious group to another,” Museum Director Vilma Faingezicht, herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors, told The Tico Times at the ceremony, during which survivors and their families were called one by one to receive a special gift.
In downtown San José, just west of the Cementerio de Obreros, sits a forgettable lot of urban real estate where the municipality and the Public Works and Transport Ministry park garbage trucks and heavy equipment. But on this same spot 73 years ago, an internment camp was erected by the government to hold hundreds of German-Costa Rican prisoners after the United States and Costa Rica entered World War II in December 1941.
In 1936 and 1937, young Werner Franz worked as a cabin boy on the Hindenburg, the largest, fastest and sleekest mode of transportation the world had seen up to that time.
