Well since it was supposed to rain today, I had decided to do a day trip. But other than a few sprinkles, the rain pretty much held off. Today was another one of those “heavy” days since I visited a Nazi concentration camp named Terezín about an hour from Prague. It was a group tour but only two people went so it was like a private tour. The tour guide was Jewish and had family that had been at this camp so he was very knowledgeable on the site as well as passionate and somewhat emotional (rightfully so) when telling the story of this camp. First I’ll share a high level overview of the camp, then more details.
Terezín was originally a fortified town named after the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa (it’s called “Theresienstadt” in German). It was built in the 1780’s with state-of-the-art, Star-shaped walls designed to keep out the Prussians. In 1941, the Nazis removed the 7,000 inhabitants and brought in 58,000 Jews, creating a horribly overcrowded ghetto. Ironically, the town’s medieval walls, originally meant to keep Germans out, were later used by Germans to keep the Jews in. As the Nazis’ model “Jewish Town” for deceiving Red Cross inspectors, Terezín fostered the illusion that its Jewish inmates lived relatively normal lives – making the sinister truth all the more cruel.
As I mentioned, Terezín was the Nazis model “Jewish Town”, a concentration camp dolled up for propaganda purposes. Here, in a supposedly “self-governed Jewish settlement area”, Jewish culture seemed to thrive, as “citizens” put on plays and concerts, published a magazine, and raised their families. But it was all a carefully planned deception, intended to convince Red Cross inspectors that Jews were being treated well. The Nazis even coached prisoners on how to answer the inspectors’ anticipated questions.
The Nazi authorities also used Terezín as a place to relocate elderly and disabled Jews from throughout the Third Reich – so the ghetto was filled with prisoners not only from the Czech lands but from all over Europe.
In the fall of 1944, the Nazis began transporting Jews from Terezín to even more sever death camps (especially Auschwitz) in large numbers. Virtually all Terezín’s Jews (155,000 over the course of the war) ultimately ended up dying – either here (35,000) or in extermination camps farther east.
Of the 15,000 children who passed thru Terezín from 1942 to 1944, fewer than 100 survived. The artwork they created at Terezín is a striking testimony to the cruel horror of the Holocaust. In 1994, Hana Volavkova, a Terezín survivor and the director of the Jewish Museum in Prague, collected the children’s artwork and poems in the book “I Never Saw Another Butterfly”. Selections of the drawings are also on display at Prague’s Pinkas Synagogue which I have not had a chance to see yet.
I know that’s a lot of heavy stuff but in the pictures I included I thought two of them were really powerful and somewhat eerie. The one at the camp where the sign reads “work sets you free” and was the entrance that all prisoners went thru had a rainbow appear in the sky above it. The other one where the beams of light are shining down was sadly where they would execute the prisoners.
Also the first picture symbolizes a railroad to heaven since all the Jews were transported to the camps via rail and most died and went to heaven.
Of course I found a stately church in the town square that I included to balance out the sadness.
That’s all for today. I hope everyone’s Wednesday is going well.
Jeff
The Wandering Italian 