Terezin was built in 1780 by Austrian Emperor Joseph II, and named for his mother, empress Maria Theresa, who was, by the way, a raging anti-Semite. Incidentally, Joseph's sister was Marie Antoinette. Terezin was laid out like a Medieval fortress, with star-shaped walls and moats. Joseph wanted to be ready in case the Germans attacked. By the 1930's, it was a farm town of seven thousand residents.
When the Nazis decided to use it as a camp, they just threw the seven thousand residents out, and packed it full of seventy thousand Jews, and a handful of other undesirables. Things got interesting, wait, let's make that surreal, when the German treatment of Jews got called into question by the international community.
In response, the Nazis decided to create a fiction: Theresienstadt, the model ghetto. The city the Fuhrer gave to the Jews. There were propaganda movies made, showing the Jews of Terezin, supposedly happy in their new home, playing sports, playing music, staging plays, composing, writing, you name it. And totally fake nice accommodations were built, in order to pretend that the Jews were better off there.
There actually was a great deal of artistic output. There was an orchestra, there were plays and opera written and performed, and paintings painted. And it was the site of a successful inspection by the international Red Cross. Of course it was a six-hour inspection visit for which the Nazis had been preparing for one year.
Mostly, people perished. Over-work, malnutrition, disease, and execution were the main causes of death. And there were regular shipments of prisoners dispatched to Auschwitz, to be gassed.
I didn't take a lot of pictures. You can find pictures easily online, if you are interested. I found myself thinking a lot about the townspeople. We encountered them working in the buildings and museums, selling tickets, standing guard over the exhibits, working in the food concessions, etc. There weren't any Jews. Of course, I can't imagine a Jew living in the town. I mean can you see listing Terezin as your return address?! Impossible.
But there are people living and working in Terezin. There are businesses. Something modern, called Dynatech. Also a nursery. And those people who sold us tickets. They gawked at us as if we were peculiar, coming to see mock-ups of over-crowded barracks (the Nazis granted 1.65 square meters per person), and to wander about the site of unspeakable cruelty. It must be peculiar for them. It's a mixed blessing, I guess. It brings people and money into their town.
I was curious. And I needed to pay my respects. Oh, it was more complicated than that, but I can't do any better just yet. Here are a few pictures.
This is an entrance to an SS prison.
This is a light fixture that was made by Jewish prisoners. It hangs in what was the SS troopers dining hall, and is currently a snack bar.
In this dry moat, starving Jewish prisoners labored to produce vegetables for their well-fed captors.
In the early afternoon, we got on a bus for the return trip to Prague. We were drained.
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