"Theresienstadt" a Terezin Travel Page by nicolaitan

This memorial to the victims of Nazi depravity is but an hour north of Prague and easily accessed, yet visited by no more than 30000 per year.

Driving thru the rolling farmlands north of Prague on a bright sunny September day, parking in the neat quiet lot, and walking a tree-lined path with a peaceful well-tended cemetery adjacent cannot prepare for the horrors to be encountered beyond the arched passageway at the end of the path. Originally built as a fortress town by Austro-Hungarian Emperor Joseph II to protect against invaders from the north in 1780-90, and named after his anti-Semitic mother Maria Theresa, advances (?) in warfare quickly made the garrison town concept obsolete, and Terezin became a little town with a prison and languished for 150 years. During WWI, it housed Gavrilo Princip who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, a prime cause of WWI. He died in 1918 at this site of tuberculosis, having spent the last years of his life in a small cell with no light and with no human contact. This cell is image 2 on the First Yard Tip. Also during the war, the fortress was a prisoner-of-war camp.

For Reinhard Heydrich and the Nazis, this double fortress was a perfect location for a Gestapo prison and a concentration camp for the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Liberated by Russian forces on May 8, 1945, Terezin was initially used to house captured Nazis in the small fortress and repatriated Czechs in the large fortress. The military finally left in 1966.

In 1947, the Czechoslovak government created the National Suffering Memorial, precursor of the Terezin Memorial, the only memorial in the Czech Republic. It cares for the cemeteries, sponsors research education and the Museum, and commemorates the victims of the Nazi occupation. The original townspeople returned after the war, and today Terezin itself is a small manufacturing center for clothing and furniture.

The punctilious Nazis carefully distinguished between concentration camps, where Jews were isolated from the general community and lived in towns, and extermination camps, where millions of Jews were murdered. The Holocaust would kill 12 million, half Jews, and the remainder others not meeting the Aryan ideal including particularly Gypsies, as well as the physically and mentally challenged, blacks, and homosexuals among others. Terezin was conceived as a collection point for Jews to be transferred to their deaths in the east. Approximately 140000 people entered Terezin, perhaps 17500 survived the brutal living conditions, starvation, disease, and most feared - transfer to the extermination camps (an estimated 87000). It is stated that less than 150 children survived.

The concentratioon of Jews in separate cities and camps was watched with interest by some outside the Nazi world (FDR not included). So Terezin was set up as an ideal showplace city for the new Jewish life and to disguise the liquidations at other camps. Until overcrowding and disease killed many near the war's end, Terezin was presented to the outside world as a typical Jewish City. On a Red Cross visit of 1944, the inspectors were fooled by stores filled with food and hardware, a staged soccer game, and theatre shows. Terezin received the cream of Jewish intelligentsia - scientists, musicians, writers, the cultured - who strived to maintain a semblance of normal life and therefore unwittingly aided the Nazi ruse. Formal education was forbidden but through music, art, and poetry readings, Jewish culture was kept alive. The poems and drawings of the children (and some adults) keep alive the Nazi horrors both in the local Ghetto museum and at museums around the world.

In the closing months of the war horrible conditions worsened. The Large Fortress, designed for perhaps 6000 inhabitants, held 10 times that with severe overcrowding, extreme food shortages, and rampant disease leading to increasing death rates.

Today's visitor to the Large Fortress finds a very quiet, very clean village with large areas of park and well-tended buildings within the great brick ramparts. For most, a stop at the Ghetto Museum must suffice since there is little attraction elsewhere within the walls except the outside of buildings and empty parks and little time to explore.

This was the first Gestapo prison in the Czech region, well-suited with its high ramparts and moat. 90,000 would enter, at least 2500 died here from execution, torture and maltreatment, and disease including a war-ending typhus outbreak. The cruelty of the Gestapo guards in this facility is epic in proportion. Many thousands were transferred to other prisons and courts and eventually died as well. Most prisoners were political, Czech patriots and resistance fighters, with others from many nations including Russia, Poland, France, and the Balkan nations. Jews were few - transfer to the death camps was just as effective - those sent here were accused of cultural crimes - teaching, stealing art materials, etc. Of course, they received the most brutal treatment of the inmates. At least 5000 inmates were women, housed in a special courtyard.

Even here, in the shadow of death, and living in inhuman conditions, culture could not be killed. In the evenings, secret presentations and discussions on the arts, politics, and culture persisted despite persecution enabling us today to understand more of life in this hellhole. Oddly, executions at the Small Fortress were relatively infrequent, probably about 250 according to records. But in the closing months of the war, as in the large fortress, severe overcrowding with disease and starvation led to the deaths of many inmates.