Wednesday, we took a 7 hour tour to the town of Terezin which was the location of one of the Nazi concentration camps and considered a "model" by the Nazis. It was used in propaganda videos of the ideal Jewish life in the camps. It was also inspected by the Swiss Red Cross during the war.
The one hour train ride took us to Bohušovice
nad Ohří, the nearest station to the town. The scenic trip followed the Vtlava and Elbe rivers as it went north. At the station, unlike what would have happened to the thousands of Jews who arrived here who were forced to walk carrying all their possessions, we were bused to just outside the walls of the town where we walked to the cemetery and crematorium.
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| The train station which looks stark and foreboding even today |
By way of some background, here is some information from Wikipedia:
The fortress of Theresienstadt in
the north-west region of Bohemia was constructed between the years 1780 and
1790 on the orders of the Austrian emperor Joseph II. It was designed as part of a projected but
never fully realised fort system of the monarchy, another piece being the fort
of Josefov. Theresienstadt was named for
the mother of the emperor, Maria Theresa of Austria, who reigned as archduchess
of Austria in her own right from 1740 until 1780. By the end of the 19th
century, the facility was obsolete as a fort; in the 20th century, the fort was
used to accommodate military and political prisoners.
After Germany invaded and
occupied Czechoslovakia, on June 10, 1940, the Gestapo took control of Terezín
and set up a prison in the "Small Fortress", the town
citadel on the east side. The first inmates arrived June 14. By the end of the war, the small fortress had processed more than 32,000
prisoners, of whom 5,000 were female; they were imprisoned for varying
sentences. The prisoners were predominantly Czech at first, and later other
nationalities were imprisoned there, including Russians,
Poles, Germans, and Yugoslavs. Most were political prisoners.
By November 24, 1941, the Nazis
adapted the "Main Fortress" (the walled town of
Theresienstadt), located on the west side of the river, as a ghetto. Jewish survivors have recounted the extensive
work they had to do for more than a year in the camp, to try to provide basic
facilities for the tens of thousands of people who came to be housed there.
From 1942, the Nazis interned the
Jews of Bohemia and Moravia, elderly Jews and persons of "special
merit" in the Reich, and several thousand Jews from the Netherlands and
Denmark. Theresienstadt thereafter became known as the destination for the
Altentransporte ("elderly transports") of German Jews, older than 65.
Although in practice the ghetto, run by
the SS, served as a transit camp for Jews enroute to extermination camps, it
was also presented as a "model Jewish settlement" for propaganda
purposes.
During a 1944 Red Cross visit,
and in a propaganda film, the Nazis presented Theresienstadt to outsiders as a
model Jewish settlement but it was a concentration camp. More than 33,000
inmates died as a result of malnutrition, disease, or the sadistic treatment by
their captors. Whereas some survivors
claimed the prison population reached 75,000 at one time, according to official
records, the highest figure reached (on September 18, 1942) was 58,491. They
were crowded into barracks designed to accommodate 7,000 combat troops.
In the autumn of 1944, the Nazis
began the liquidation of the ghetto, deporting more prisoners to Auschwitz and
other camps; in one month, they deported 24,000 victims (about 18,000 in 11
transports between 28 September and 28 October).
Our tour
started in the cemetery outside the town where we saw the individual graves,
mass graves, a cenotaph for the Christians who had perished there often because either they
were married to Jews or just “looked Jewish”. As well, there is a monument to Russian
soldiers who liberated the town. In the
same location was the crematorium. That
was a very grim place to visit!
Apparently, it was run 24x7 and the temperatures in it were constantly
at 50’. Many of the Jews who were forced to work there died. They estimate over 100 bodies
were incinerated daily. From there, we
went to two other buildings: the first
was where the urns were stored and the second where the bodies were prepared
for cremation. It was horrific and
sobering to see it all!
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| The Mass Graves with a giant Menorah in the Background |
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| The Crematorium - no photos were permitted inside it |
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From there we walked into the town. Givi explained that when Terezin was built as barracks, Franz Joseph also proclaimed that
Jews were equal to other people. So, it is very ironic that all those years
later it was picked as the perfect place to create a concentration camp as part of The Final Solution. It was perfect: not only was there housing (the barracks had
never been used) but it was a walled city and on a train line that would eventually lead to Auschwitz. Initially, young Jews were
herded up and sent here to “prepare” what was promised to be a lovely town for
the Jews to live. The first “residents”
were older Jews – politicians, doctors, other professionals. It was all part of Reinhard Heydrich’s plan
to eliminate the Jews. There are a book and a movie about an assassination attempt on Heydrich. Givi recommended the book called HHHH by Laurent Binet and both he and Anita, our Monday tour guide, recommended the movie called Anthropoid, a Czech movie released in 2016, about an assassination attempt on Heydrich. Someone said it is available on Netflix.
The barracks
are named after prominent German cities and there are, I think, 17 of
them. Women and children under 10 (boys)
and 14 (girls) lived with them. Men were
separated and only permitted limited contact with them. Once the children reached a certain age, the
boys were held in one barracks and the girls in another.the town itself. Gigi explained
I have to say (and everyone seemed to feel the same) that the town has a very weird and eerie feeling. In spite of people living there, it seems like a ghost town, in more ways than one! We visited several museums - one was a replica of the barracks when they were inhabited. The living conditions were horrific and the details Givi gave us are too awful to repeat. Suffice it to say there was immeasurable suffering here.
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There was an exhibition
of how this camp was used as propaganda to show the Red Cross and Germans that
the conditions in the camps were lovely.
It was supposed to be a “model” camp and when the Red Cross inspected
it, there were Jews playing soccer, enjoying music and sipping coffee in
cafes. Of course, it was all staged and,
immediately afterwards, those people who participated were shipped to Auschwitz.
One of the
most famous stories about this camp is the woman, a graphic artist, who managed
to have art supplies smuggled in and she encouraged the children to draw. Many of those creations she hid in a suitcase
under the floorboards in one of the barracks.
Later, she and her husband were sent to Auschwitz. While she did not survive, her husband did
and, once liberated, he returned to Terrezin to recover the drawings. A novel called The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman details some of these horrors.
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| One of the barracks |
We viewed other museums which honoured the artists, actors and writers who were imprisoned here. Many of the drawings were gripping in their depiction of life in the camp.
We continued
on seeing the main square where the propaganda film had been made. The director who made it was a famous German
movie star and director (Jewish) so it had even more credence when it was
released. He was later sent to Auschwitz
and perished one day before the death camp was liberated.
Givi gave us a lot of history and statistics
which I can’t remember but need to look up.
The mind boggles by what happened here. There was the plaque below which details some of the numbers:
The town still has a sense of evil and we couldn’t understand how
anyone could live there, particularly in the barracks. Some of them are actually rented out as apartments. There is also a hotel (a pension, actually) where rooms overlook the crematorium and place where the urns were stored. The hotel is now for sale. Hard to believe anyone would want to stay there! Givi told us
the residents seem a bit strange and that he really doesn’t like the place Who could argue with him on that!
