CHICAGO (AP) – Holocaust survivor Fritzie Fritzshall didn’t know how she’d react when she saw the dilapidated, rusted remnants of a Nazi-era German rail car parked in the middle of downtown Chicago.

At the age of 12, Fritzshall and her family were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp from a Jewish ghetto in Klucharky, Czechoslovakia, in a similar box car. Her grandfather died during the ride.

Fritzshall and other Holocaust survivors gathered Wednesday to unveil the rail car on the 67th anniversary of the infamous Kristallnacht, or “Night of Broken Glass,’’ in which more than 1,000 synagogues were vandalized and about 100 Jews were killed. The rail car will be displayed when the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, which organizers say is the largest such facility in the Midwest, opens in Skokie in 2008.

“Looking at this box car has brought a full circle to me,’’ Fritzshall said. “It may be many years later but the smell and the fear that was in that box car, that has not left me and I’m sure many survivors feel the same way.’’

Museum organizers say it will help survivors heal, preserve personal belongings and educate people on the events that led up to the Nazis’ plan to decimate Europe’s Jewish population.

“If we change (the minds of) some of the young people, they will realize that we’re all the same regardless of color, regardless of religion and the world will be a much better place to live,’’ Barbara Steiner said before Wednesday’s ceremony. Steiner survived the Warsaw ghetto and three concentration camps.