Terezin

Memorial and entry to Terezin
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The day started out cloudy and foggy, and maybe that was foreshadowing, or just bad weather. I don't think I have been as aware of my Jewishness or my minority status as I have been on this trip. In some cases, I sought it out, like the day I went to Terezin. The whole visit to Prague has been an incredible awakening and sense of re-discovery. I did not know what to expect on the visit to Terezin. The drive was pretty uneventful, and then the guide announced we were at the small camp. We disembarked from the bus and walked through the memorial cemetary; I could tell from the comments that I was the only Jew on the tour. We met the guide especially for Terezin. Just being there, a place, if not for extermination itself, was certainly a key mechanism in it. We walked to the assembly point and there was a sign that was all too familiar to me, 'Arbeit macht frei', 'Work will make you free'. The deadly irony attached to these words is no less painful than I'm sure it was 65 years ago. These words are also at Auschwitz. We walked and saw the different processing areas, the small rooms, designed to  hold 30 people that held 100; people slept standing up, or 4 to a bed with no mattress. The different isolation cells. Dark rooms with no mattresses or blanks, just a cold cement floor.  We also went to the Ghetto and the museum which has artwork from children, as Terezin was a family camp. Very few of the children survived. There just isn't a lot to say. For some, the Holocaust is something you are forced to study in school, one of those events that happened a long time ago. For me, it is something that I grew up with: Sunday school teachers, distant cousins who hid in a farmhouse floor in Poland. I have read about for over 25 years, and yet I still felt like someone kicked me in the stomach.

Terezin
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We headed back in a thick fog.