Terezin:
The Gift of a Town
That's the ironic title of a Nazi propaganda film made during the Second World War but never issued, and of which more later. A story-board in central Prague suggests that a visit to Terezin is essential to understanding the Jewish sites in the city itself and for once it doesn't exaggerate. If you know your history, it's probably more convenient to visit the Prague sites first: if you don't, I'd suggest that a visit to Terezin would be an ideal introduction.
Some of my wife's colleagues asked why I was interested in visiting war cemeteries or somewhere like Terezin. Well, I was taken to one of the Nazi death camps on a school trip when I was perhaps fourteen, and I've since visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, so, as we'll see, Terezin was for me an appropriate way of closing the circle after some thirty-five years. In retrospect I salute the courage of the teacher who panned that first trip. It's been said that if we don't learn from history we are destined to repeat it, this is a lesson for which it's worth putting aside the guide-book of twenty-five pretty places for a moment or two.
Terezin was a 'concentration camp' rather than a death camp, and we Brits have to put our hands up for the invention of the concept, in modern times at least. We used concentration camps during the 'Boer War', but Terezin shows that the Nazi regime was well and truly capable of refining the fiendishness of the idea. This is why Terezin is important: at this distance in time it can be difficult to understand how the 'Final Solution' could have occurred and this story can give a powerful clue. Our guide said 'many people did not know what was happening'. What she was too polite to say to a British tour group was '...or were in denial or thought that morale - or their own careers - would suffer if the news got out'. Terezin was part of the way that the Nazis, unwittingly aided by the Red Cross, helped to maintain the illusion.
The place was selected because it was a fortification left over from earlier wars and so all the Nazis needed to do was convert the accommodation inside it. To outsiders the place was described as a town that had been given to the Jews to govern as they wished. The Nazis made a propaganda film during the war - the title was 'The Gift of a Town' - but then decided not to use it. Fragments have survived and are used, intercut with drawings made by inmates from the camp, form a harrowing short film. Accompanied by a sound-track of music from the camp, with voice-overs listing the statistics of the transports and ending with the 'Song of Death', residents of Terezin are shown watching a football match, gossiping through a window, watering their allotments. This was also the face the Nazis managed to present to the Red Cross, who inspected the camp twice but announced their intention well in advance.
The truth was, of course, different. Space designed for maybe 7,000 inhabitants eventually housed some 56,000 in appalling conditions. Food was so scarce that the cooks and 'soup carriers' could exchange the sludge from the bottom of the soup pails for just about any luxury they wanted. Accommodation was in dormitories holding upwards of forty people in a room which would be cramped for six and with no privacy at all. Although Terezin wasn't itself a death camp, over 35,000 died here and were cremated, their ashes stuffed into the old fortress casemates but then, just prior to liberation, thrown into the river.
The main purpose of Terezin, though, was as a transit camp. Jews from Prague, from Berlin and from innumerable other towns in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia were transported to Terezin. Originally the railway ended at a village three kilometres away, but prisoners from the ghetto eventually completed a branch-line that made the handling of transports much more efficient. In precise lots of 1,000 prisoners from Terezin were sent further east to the death camps, in particular Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the deception continued. For some time a separate 'families' camp' was maintained here, where conditions were better than in Terezin and the families were encouraged to write letters to others who remained. After six months, the inmates of the families' camp were simply taken away and gassed, replaced by new arrivals. Those on the outside, then could maintain the fiction that Jews from Berlin and other cities were being sent to Terezin, where they were self-governing and conditions were good. In the same way, anyone leaving Terezin for Auschwitz could be expecting better conditions; and so the deception continued.
Despite the conditions, the residents in the camp maintained morale by putting on theatrical and musical productions, some of them very elaborate. As a result of the demographics, there was an unusual aggregation of writers, composers, musicians and directors and nearly every building contained a performance space of some sort. Several ‘prayer rooms’ were hidden around the camp and, as I’ve said under ‘practicalities’ one can be visited if you take a formal tour from one of the firms in Josefov. Children were separated from their parents but a basic education was provided by some of the adults, including the therapy of drawing. Many children’s drawings were smuggled out and some are on display in the museum amidst a heart-rending memorial with all the children’s names. The list is very similarin style to that in the Pinkas memorial in Prague, but contains only the dates of birth. An vanishingly small percentage of the children survived to be liberated - they and their teachers were seen as a particular threat and taken away to be killed in the final days.
Our guide said 'this is only a shower'. Inmates of Terezin were allowed a shower each week, and it was a time to meet other people, exchange news and so on. How comforting it must have been to arrive at Auschwitz, already emaciated from Terezin and exhausted after the train journey in cattle trucks, to discover that mothers and children and the old and infirm were separated out and taken to somewhere that looked just like this - except that there were no windows.
Just to run the point in somewhat, the inmates of Terezin eventually found out about the gas chambers in the extermination camps was from a group of children who arrived back in Terezin from Auschwitz. When they were sent to be deloused they became hysterical at the sight of the showers, screaming ‘Gas, Gas’.
In a final irony, when the death camps in the east were liberated, the living conditions were such that most inmates were shipped out to places such as Terezin. But conditions at Terezin had deteriorated even further in the last days of the war and the emaciated prisoners were shipped back into the jaws of a Typhus epidemic.
However, a fair number of Terezin survivors moved back into the town after the war and today the place shows more of the depredations from the communist era than anything else. Most of the buildings are in poor repair and lack of cash means that they will probably remain so for some time. Having escaped my tour group in order to get a shot of the railway, however, I found a few buildings being restored and one completed as sheltered accommodation. There’s also a suggestion that more buildings will become student accommodation for the Karlov University in Prague. Terezin’s just a normal, very dilapidated, post-communist town. The games bar by the museum has the same type of customers I’m used to in urban locals’ bars the length and breadth of Europe, and while I was getting my shot of the railway siding, an elderly lady on crutches hobbled over to me and explained in German how to find a place in the fence where the corrugated iron has been bent back to get a better view of the buildings. She knew what I was after and was happy to help out. From a very sad place, a final happy memory.