Visiting Terezin

Deserted streets of Terezin.
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I swore with frustration at the bus station today. After 30 minutes of getting inaccurate directions in various forms of English, Czech, and German, we finally found the proper departure gate for the 10:00 bus to Terezin—at 10:01. Then, as I fretted over the two-hour delay before we could catch the next bus, it occurred to me that I wasn’t doing very well at letting go of the small stuff, and that it really isn’t good form to complain about missing a bus when you’re going to visit a concentration camp where over 100,000 people lost their lives.

The small fortress at Terezin.
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Doug and Nathaniel went off to see the Musical Instrument Museum (some time holding and examining a great 1744 Guarneri del Gesù violin) and to explore musical instrument shops (they ended up with a flugelhorn from Moravia), while Jeremy, Haley, and I went to see the concentration camp at Terezin/Theresienstadt, about an hour’s drive from Prague. This is a very different experience from Dachau or other camps that Haley and I have both seen. The small fortress, where political prisoners were kept, has the same oppressive atmosphere of the other camps, but the majority of the Jews sent there lived in barracks in the town in a deceptively normal atmosphere.

"Entering Terezin" by 12-yearold Helga Weissova.
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Hitler decided to use the town for propaganda purposes. He expelled all the German residents in 1942, and pretended to the world—and, more particularly, to the Red Cross visitors—that this was “the town the Fuhrer gave the Jews,” as one of his propaganda films put it. It was a genuine cultural center for some of the finest Jewish musicians, writers, and artists of the country, and the ghetto museum is filled with their work. They formed a symphony orchestra and other music ensembles, held art classes for children, and presented regular dramatic productions by both adults and children. It all seems, as I said, deceptively normal until you see a reconstruction of the barracks, where they slept like sardines, and the crematorium, the rail lines headed east, and the death dates of most of the residents listed as 1944.

Doug's new flugelhorn.
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Most heartbreaking was a room dedicated to the children who lived—and died—there (only 100 of 12,000 survived.) The room was filled with drawings they made during their art classes: memories of home and observations of camp life. The museum didn’t allow photos, but I’m pulling one picture off the internet. Helga Weissova was 12 years old when she went to the camp, and her father told her to draw what she saw. She was among the few survivors.

The most remarkable story for me was of the children’s opera, Brundibar, excerpts of which the museum attendant played for us. The opera was written in 1938, and the camp children gave 55 performances of it. It’s the story of two children outwitting and defeating an evil organ grinder, and the Nazis seemed not to pick up on its symbolism to performers and audience, even when the final words were changed from “He who loves his mother and father and native land is our friend and can play with us” to “He who loves justice and will abide by it, and is not afraid, is our friend and can play with us.”

Pictures in Wenceslaus Square commemorating the 40th anniversary of Soviet tanks entering Prague. We visited the exhibit while waiting for the next bus to Terezin.
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The fortress has a long and complex history, but one piece in particular fascinates me. After the war it was used to imprison German-speaking residents of Czechoslavakia before they were deported. I’m familiar with the German insistence in the 1930s on annexing the Sudetenland—western Czechoslavakia—because of the large number of German speakers in that region. What I didn’t know before this trip was that German speakers throughout the country lost their land and were expelled at the end of the war. Prague, Česky Krumlov—I think all the places we’ve visited on this trip—used to have large numbers of German speakers who also considered themselves Czech. Another of the mysteries of figuring out this country is understanding the history of this German/Czech interrelationship.

"And a Molotov Cocktail for the Captain?"
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The town today is inhabited, but many of the buildings are abandoned and it feels haunted. I wondered last year what it would be like to live in Dachau, a town with a notorious concentration camp. It’s almost unimaginable to think of living here, where the town itself was a death camp.