Visit to Theresienstadt

Well I’m in London now, writing this from under a doona in bed at my cousin Alex’s place in East Acton. I keep waking up really early – don’t know if it’s the remnant of jet lag or just the unfamiliarity of my surrounds, but I seem to be keeping an uncharacteristic acquaintance with the early hours of the morning!

It has been weighing on my mind that I need to write about Terezin. Going there was like remembering a nightmare that someone had told me about. The familiarity of its buildings, the names of the streets and squares and barracks, even the distinctive black and white striped paint above the entrance to a the Small Fortress was all like horrible déjà vu. Will and I caught the bus from the Metro station at Florenc out to Terezin. It’s a 61Kc 1-hour journey beyond the outer limits of Prague and into the countryside. It was bitterly cold, and the fields were a dirty white from the ice and snow. The sky was grey, and we had a sort of detached feeling that the day might be a little bit unpleasant. But as we drew near the town, my tension grew. When the Star of David-shaped walls and painted archway of the Small Fortress passed by the window of the bus, I began to realise what we’d got ourselves in for. We then drove over a bridge over the Ohre river, around a corner, and through the ramparts into the deserted Town.

For the uninitiated, the Terezin is a fortified town – a fortress – that was built in the 1780s by Emperor Joseph II and named for his mother, Maria Theresa. It was meant to protect against invasions from the north west by the nasty Prussians, but was never actually used in any combative military capacity. Terezin comprises a small, picturesque town meant to house the soliders and their families, surrounded by beautiful open planes and mountains in the distance. Its streets and squares are pretty and well laid-out. Few hundred metres from the Town is the Small Fortress, used to house political prisoners, enemies of the Habsburg Monarchy, and Prisoners of War during WWI. Because of its handy position between Western Europe and the extermination camps of the East, the Nazis pinpointed it as the perfect strategic place to gather or ‘concentrate’ some of the European Jews before sending them onwards to the Polish camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and others. So on 24 November 1941, the first transports of Prague Jews headed for Terezin - Theresienstadt, as the Germans knew it.

The conditions there were awful and many thousands of people died, but everything that is sad or evil or twisted about the town is made so much worse by what happened there in June 1944. After much to-ing and fro-ing between the Nazis and the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, a Red Cross delegation was permitted to visit the camp. In preparation for this visit, the town underwent a ‘beautification’ process. To alleviate crowding, the top level of the 3-tiered bunks was sawn off, and one third of the detainees were sent to Auschwitz for immediate liquidation. The streets were cleaned and buildings painted. Children were given extra rations in order to appear healthy and robust to the delegates, and the camp commanders chose the fittest, best-looking young people to play a role on the day of the visit. Cafes, shops, a library and sporting events were concocted out of nowhere. There were musical performances and concerts, and many writers, thinkers and academics were briefed to discuss high-brow philosophical and intellectual topics within earshot of the visiting Red Cross delegation. Children were told to moan good-naturedly about going to school and having to eat high-quality imported sardines almost every day. Basically, the stage was set for one of the biggest shams in modern history – the conversion of Terezin into a Potemkin Village.

In summary, 23 June 1944 came and went, and the Red Cross took the bait hook, line and sinker. The report written by Dr Rossel is a stunning testament to the convincing charade, and his lack of further inquiry has been condemned by many after the fact. The Nazis were so pleased by the effectiveness of the sham that they took it upon themselves to make a propaganda film called ‘Hitler gives a Town to the Jews’. The fears of the international community were alleviated, they let themselves off the hook, and meanwhile thousands died at Theresienstadt, and many more thousands were funnelled through its walls and on to the Eastern extermination camps.

I will write more about this later. Stay tuned.

j x

I’ve been putting it off and putting it off, but here I am to write some more about Terezin. Won’t that be fun. As I was saying, the bus drove us through the ramparts and into the town. We were unceremoniously booted off the bus and left standing opposite a big, empty square rimmed by trees that look like they’ve never been green. We saw a sign pointing to the Ghetto Museum, and decided to go and investigate. We bought our tickets and walked up a big white staircase into the museum. It was amazing – there was so much information we could have stood there for hours reading. There were clothes, artefacts, videos of survivors telling their stories of life in the ghetto. There were maps, drawings, letters, quotations, musical scores, photographs and an unbelievably comprehensive coverage of the whole strategy of the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ (the lovely euphemism for ‘Getting rid of all those pesky Jews’). We then saw a sign advertising the museum’s cinema, and decided we would like to watch whatever film they wanted to show us about the place. So we went into a huge 400-ish seat theatre and sat down. Completely alone. Completely the only two people in the whole place. And watched a film entitled ‘Terezin: Chapters from History’. It was awful, we left feeling kind of soul-squashed and decided that before adventuring out into the cold we needed some sustenance. So we went down into the little cafeteria and had some lunch. I can’t explain what was strange about it – I guess it was just a bit surreal that the Coca Cola culture is so pervasive that it even has a place in a museum commemorating the greatest horror ever committed by mankind. Oh well.

So we had lunch and then began walking around the town. Our first destination was the Magdeburg Barracks which had been used to house internees during the war. We couldn’t find it due to the extreme confusion resulting from the discrepancy between the street names on the map and the street names according to the signs, so we wandered aimlessly for a while, and in doing so managed to become filled with the aura of the town. It was cold, grey and empty. And although I know there were occasionally cars and people and dogs, I remember an oppressive silence. We walked around this derelict town, broken, boarded-up windows everywhere and eventually found the Magdeburg Barracks. It was strange – this was the only part of the museumy stuff that we didn’t like, because they’d done up the barracks all cosy-like, and to be honest it all looked kind of like a cute room where you might go to stay for Year 7 camp. Hmmm. Maybe not exactly on the money, there. So we left the barracks and crossed the road to this strange strange strange little op shop. There were no lights on, and they sold strange things, but the worst of it was definitely a large pile of shoes in the back corner, next to a huge rack stuffed with old coats, which was unavoidably reminiscent of photos of abandoned belongings in a Holocaust museum. We couldn’t get out of there fast enough. And we didn’t buy anything.

Our next destination was the Crematorium and Ceremonial Room. We followed the signs emblazoned with a Star of David and the word ‘Krematorium’. The ground was covered with dirty ice and snowy sludge, and as we followed one of the roads around the perimeter we saw a man with a dog, up on a little hill next to the street. We risked life and limb to climb up the embankment, looking thoroughly ridiculous trying not to fall on our asses on the ice. When we reached the top, we realised we had accidentally stumbled upon one of the prisons. It’s hard to describe the layout of the town, but this barracks-style prison had a deep moat surrounding it, and the brown brick wall was high and impenetrable with very small windows every few metres. It wasn’t done up all museumy, and it was overgrown, dilapidated and hostile looking. Will recalls our accidentally finding that building as one of the more powerful and awful moments of the visits.

We eventually came to the Ceremonial room. For the first few months, at least, when someone died at Theresienstadt they were properly farewelled according to the custom of their religion, and buried in a coffin, in a civilised way. Needless to say those practises soon fell by the wayside as the mortality rate skyrocketed. In September 1942 the ghetto was at its most crowded, holding 58,500 people. In the same month, the Crematorium was completed, equipped with four modern furnaces, which were put to hard work as the death rate reached 131 people each day. We walked down a pathway into into the semi-underground Jewish Ceremonial chamber, which had been beautifully adjusted to tell the history of the place. There was a primitive sort of autopsy room, and then the space where burial ceremonies had been held. It was very dark, and the ceiling was low. I looked down through a metal gateway where I could see nothing but a long, black passageway, with many, many black metal doors, all sitting slightly ajar. I could only just make out their outlines in the darkness, and the empty black passage seemed to go on for kilometres, with door after door after door... It was like something out of a nightmare. It chilled me to the bone and we left immediately.

We walked down a long avenue (after Will stopped to play with some funny animals that were in the little canal / river / moat – they were beavers or otters or something, I don’t remember…), and there appeared at the end of it a huge black marble menorah. We had come to the Jewish Cemetery and Crematorium. I can’t really write much except to ask you to imagine what it’s like to walk into a big stone room with four 8-foot long huge metal furnaces, all with ashes and embers still sitting at the mouth of the machines. It’s horrible. It was so cold and silent, and we wandered around for a few minutes before just getting the hell out of there. In a tiny little side passage there was a room still set up for autopsies – the huge stone tables with drains and a big sink at one end. Brrr. Oh, and to add to the delight there was a little glass cabinet boasting some original implements – things to cut and grab and slice and remove and oh my gosh – it was a bit too much. Will walked into one little empty room and said “oh, there’s nothing in here, it’s just a little room”. I saw the plaque on the door and told him in a little voice that that was the morgue. We got out of there pretty quick after that…

As you can imagine, we were not feeling too chirpy at this stage of the day. We decided that we would just walk around to the Small Fortress (a 10 minute walk from the town), have a look around there and then get back on the bus to Prague. Nice, warm, safe, happy, comfortable Prague. It was SO cold. Bitterly, bitterly cold. I was wearing 3 pairs of pants – my leggings, my jarmie pants AND my jeans, and had about 6 tops on, as well as a coat. But dang, it was cold.

We bought a cup of hot chocolate from a lady who was sitting behind a counter cut out of the wall of a building near the entrance to the town. The cup was full and we were walking so I managed to slosh hot chocolate all over my gloves. First it burned, and then it was freezing cold. We walked back out through the ramparts leading into the town, and made our way around to the Small Fortress. We crossed over the Ohre, a raging, slime green coloured river with cliff-like banks lined with buildings we could tell used to be kind of grandiose. It was eerie. The only person in sight was a homeless man who was babbling incoherently and following us, asking for money. Everything was just deserted. It was like a plague had gone through and everyone had just dropped everything and left.

Anyway we got to the Small Fortress. The Small Fortress was a bit different to the town in that it served as a Gestapo prison, not just a ghetto. So there were all sorts of other people there – enemies of the Reich, resistance fighters, illegal communists and other such ‘undesirables’. During World War II, 32,000 inmates including 5,000 women went through the Fortress. We walked past the many headstones, the huge crucifix and the Star of David and in the front entrance, with its black and white striped archway. We were given a ‘program’ sort of thing – a little brochure with a suggested route through the Fortress. We started in the Administration Courtyard, which is adorned with the retrospectively ominous words “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work will make you free). There were little rooms off the courtyard where people were registered, made to strip and put on their prison garb, officers’ rooms, and a clothes store. There were cells where hundreds of people were crammed. There was a little ‘surgery’, and solitary confinement cells. Whoa brother. 8 seconds in one of those was plenty for me, thanks. There was a bathroom and delousing room which – because it was just a room with showers in it – looked exactly like an Auschwitz gas chamber. Creepy. There was also a Hospital block which was set up late in the war, somewhat in response to the typhus epidemic which swept through the prison in 1944. Here, imprisoned doctors and nurses were made to care for the sick.

The next part was one of the most horrible things I’ve ever experienced. The words ‘Underground Passage’ will usually inspire a faint sense of unease, but unfortunately we had no idea what was coming to us. Even the little warning placard at the entry of this tunnel warning us that it was half a kilometre long didn’t put us off. Turns out it should have. Turns out I am prone to FREAK OUT a bit in extremely long, bad-vibed, pitch-black-in-places underground tunnels haunted by the ghosts of thousands of murdered Jews. Oh cool.

Anyway that spat us out into daylight (freakin FINALLY) into the execution ground. There was a set of primitive looking gallows, and a patch of grass against a wall which I had seen a number of times in photographs of people being shot in the head. This was not a good feeling, and we continued on through the little wall leading to what was at one point a mass grave, where about 600 bodies had been exhumed and relocated to the cemetery after the war. Strangely, though, this are was so beautiful. It was surrounded by the rich dark orange brick walls, and it was lush and green. There was a stream running through it, in which there were lots of frogs and fish, either dead or frozen (or both?) in a state of suspended animation in the freezing water. It was so completely strange. There were these two frogs sort of facing eachother and with their arms and legs spread, and they looked like a photograph of two frogs ballroom dancing. I would say that Will got a stick and poked them, but unfortunately that was me. There is photographic evidence.

Anyway we then turned left and walked through another arched gateway, which is called ‘The Gate of Death’, where prisoners had to walk on their way to the place of execution. Directly on the other side of the Gate of Death was a swimming pool for the guards and their families, and a cinema built for their entertainment. Less that 20 metres from the execution ground and mass grave. What must the children of those guards have seen? Imagine the sights, sounds and smells of life surrounded by so much murder, in which their daddies were partaking! It’s unthinkable. Anyway we went into the little cinema, which was so cute. All wood panelled and quaint and charming, which of course made it 50 times more horrible. Will and I of course exchanged half-assed jokes about finding out the session times for Brokeback Mountain, but our hearts weren’t in it.

It was getting late by this stage, and we had to hurry. We continued along our little self-tour to see more solitary confinement cells, a couple more courtyards, and then the huge Fourth Courtyard, which I had seen many pictures of, fully equipped with its ‘warning gallows’. And was it just our imaginations, or did there appear to be a smattering of bullet holes at head and chest height on the wall in the far corner of the Courtyard? After 3 people tried to escape from cell 38 in March 1945, one of them and two other men and a woman selected at random were executed as a warning to others who would attempt to escape. The other two would-be escapers were caught and stoned to death in the first courtyard.

We then saw a museum of artefacts belonging to the SS and Gestapo, which finished off with some photographs of hangings of camp commanders. As we were looking at them, a little old lady sidled up to us and pointed out that those executions had happened just outside the window over there.

All in all it was horrific. The town was freezing cold, sad, lonely and all but deserted. Occasionally we would see three or four young children walking down the street together dressed in brightly coloured parkas and scarves, and we would ask ourselves how their parents could possibly live there. By the end of the day we both felt completely suffocated by the awfulness, and couldn’t wait to get back on the bus. We got back to Prague and had a meal together, and then had a couple of drinks with Neil before turning in for the night. I was (was?! AM!) still haunted by the feeling of the place. It is indescribable. I said to Will at one point that I had never been in a place that feels like it is actually God-forsaken. But this place certainly seemed to be. I don’t know about the theology of that idea, but there you.

I took heaps of photos, but I don’t have a digital camera! You will obviously be welcome to see them when I next am where you are.

If you have any questions or comments or anything please leave a comment!

Cheers

J x