It was her first trip by train, and she will never forget it. German SS-men were yelling outside, and the cattle wagons had bare wooden floors instead of seats, with observation slits instead of windows. Edith Erbrich remembers how an SS man ordered her father to lift her and her sister up because her mother, standing outside the train, wanted to see her once more. 'My father told us that mummy cannot join us, she has to take care of the house,' she said.

Erbrich was seven years old when she, her sister and her father were deported by the Nazis to the concentration camp in Theresienstadt, Czechoslavakia. She survived. Some 11,000 other Jewish children died. Now a new exhibition about their fate has sparked an extraordinary and bitter dispute between the German government and the state-owned national railway.

The exhibition, put together by anti-Nazi campaigners Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, was inspired by stories such as Erbrich's and has already been shown at 18 French railway stations. Now the couple want to show it at train stations across Germany, but Hartmut Mehdorn, the chief executive of Deutsche Bahn, the national railway, has refused.