The truth about Therisienstadt.

We didn't get off the train in Therisienstadt, which I will call Terezin from now on, but in a village nearby, Bohusovice nad Ohri. 
At that moment there were no buses so we did what the Jewish prisoners had done in the past: We marched. It wasn't exactly around the corner and as we walked I imagined a big group of people, not all as healthy as we were and also consisting of young children and elderly marching all the way.  

It's only about 6.8 kilometers.

It was only in the beginning that the prisoners marched to Terezin until the Nazis gave some of the Jewish prisoners the task to build a railroad that led all the way to the concentration camp. This wasn't done because the Nazis felt sorry for their prisoners. This was done to hide the large amount of prisoners that arrived at and left Terezin, dead or alive, every day from the citizens of Bohusovice nad Ohri. 

What used to the graveyard and is now a memorial and the building that used to be the crematorium at the right.

A total of 35000 people have died in Terezin during the war. The bodies of the prisoners who passed away were buried in separate graves at first. Religious services were held for the prisoners. Some Jews got the task to prepare the bodies for religious services. The religious services were not held because the Nazis cared for and respected the Jews so much and valued their tradition and religion but for propaganda reasons. It only had to seem like they cared.
We walked passed the graveyard that was no longer in use but now only had a symbolical meaning and is used for memorial purposes. 

We could see the little stones that were placed on the gravestones. Jewish people don't put flowers.The stones represent a long lasting connection with the deceased ones.
A burned down tree that was standing on the graveyard and represented all the children that had died.







But the prisoners fell down by bunches and burying them separately turned out to be a time consuming joke. About 35 people used to be buried per day.  This led to the creation of mass graves in which the bodies could be dumped, about 200 at a time. This seemed to be good solution at first but there was a small problem. The water level around Terezin was pretty high and because of this there was a big chance that the decomposing bodies would contaminate the drinking water. 
But there's a solution for every problem and in this case the solution was a crematorium, that was built in 1942.

We visited the crematorium first.  We were told that every thing had been damaged by the flooding of the Voltava in 2002 but had been restored. We were told and could see that the crematorium consisted of four rooms. The dead bodies used to be piled up in the first one. Some Jewish people, who got to do the wonderful job, used to drag the bodies to the morgue piled up on a hearse because there were no horses that they could use. Hearses filled with dead bodies were being dragged through town, all the time and every day.  

A hearse with dead bodies.

The wooden coffins

You can imagine that this was not very hygienic plus it was a constant reminder of death. Wooden coffins were used to and then re-used to transport the bodies from the morgue to the crematorium until the coffins literally fell part.

The autopsy room

Then there was also the autopsy room. Another group of prisoners got the task to sort out the bodies. Most bodies went straight into the oven but an autopsy would have to be done if the prisoners had died of a suspicious cause.  The bodies awaited the autopsy in a big refrigerator. After the autopsy thee bodies of the people who had died of suspicious reasons were immediately send to Auschwitz.






The biggest room was the room where the bodies were slid into one of the four big ovens and burned. The Nazis did not really take into account that according to the Jewish religion people are  not allowed to be cremated, that's just how inconsiderate they were.
The ash of the Jews that were burned were stored in boxes. When the war was coming to an end and the Nazis realized that they were at the losing hand the boxes with ashes of many of the Jews that had passed away were set on fire, buried or thrown into the river.

The room with the big ovens

Young Jewish men were given the task to perform the wonderful task of burning the bodies. You can imagine that pushing your own people, your family members and friends into an oven for almost 24 hours a day wasn't the easiest job. And you had to check up on the cremation process from time to time to see if every thing was going well and to check whether you had to crank up the temperature if the process was taking too long. This wonderful job usually led to a great amount of psychological problems.





The job also led to  physical stress. The workdays were long and the workers got little food. 
A small detail was that the temperature in the  crematorium could rise up to 50 degrees.
The last room was probably the bedroom where the Jewish men that worked in the crematorium slept. These men were not allowed to go back to their families and friends to tell about the great workday they had.

The Terezin concentration camp had been used a military fortress in the past. This came in handy to the Nazis because the protective walls were already there. The only thing left to be done was to bring in "the Jews". The fortress was also surrounded by a moat. This is a deeper part in the ground that usually surrounds a fortress and that can be filled with water to protect the people in the fortress against invading groups. 

Because of lack of space these moats of Terezin were used for agriculture, where the prisoners could grow their own food.

The prisoners worked very hard and performed different tasks.  The prisoners also worked on several things to serve the Nazis and the German country. They produced for example cooling material They though that if they worked hard they would get more food and that if they worked very hard they had less chance to  be transported to 'the East' . They thought that if they were really productive they would have more chance to survive. That is what they thought at least. 
The opposite was true. Most of these people that worked for the Nazis were not rewarded and did not have more chance to survive the war. Instead most of these people were sent to Auschwitz right after they had finished serving their purpose. This shows how thankful the Nazis were towards the Jews. 

Lack of space was a big issue within the walls of Terezin. For this reason the corridors in the walls of the fortress were also used as dorms for the elderly.
The Jewish elderly had been told wonderful stories about the camp. The camp had been portrayed as some kind of luxurious resort where they could spend their last years in peace. It was portrayed as an inviting place. The elderly would literally line up to go to this wonderful place and sold all their belongings to buy a ticket to Terezin. They did not bring anything along because they thought they would be provided of everything they needed.  At least that's what they thought. 

 But the truth was very different. The truth was that they were considered useless and were simply placed somewhere where they would not be a burden. They were literally piled up on their beds in the corridors of the fortress and left to die. Some volunteers got the task to collect these elderly people, literally collect them, when they would wander of and get lost and roam around the town. These volunteers would find them and accompany them back to their underground and chilly "dorms". We walked through these corridors in spring and it felt like winter down there. Imagine what it would have felt like in the winter? Way to treat the elderly!

One of the corridors that were used as a dorm for the elderly.

The other prisoners slept in overcrowded dormitories that sometimes housed about 100 to 150 people with an average of 1.65 square meter per individual. About 7 beds or more were placed right next to each other. You can imagine that there was absolutely no privacy. As if that was not enough there were also bed bugs, lice and rats. Fortunately the Nazis decided to do something about the rat problems. One day they kicked all the prisoners out of the dormitories and sprayed rat poison. That would definitely solve the problem. Unfortunately they brought the prisoners back in right after this process.

A drawing made by one of the prisoners of a dormitory.

There were also only 1 or 2 restrooms for all these people and the biggest problem was typhus.

Males and females lived separately to " prevent them from multiplying". No the Nazis didn't want that to happen. The Jewish women who were brought to the camp pregnant were forced to have an abortion.

The trouble started with the Nuremberg laws. Among other things it was established who were considered to be Jewish. If your father mother or grandparents were Jewish you were considered Jewish. It didn't matter if you were baptized, which actually made you a Christian. Thus a part of the "Jewish" people in the concentration camps were actually Christian.

The people in Terezin had the "right" to self-determination.  Well it had to look as if that was the case. The government consisted of their own people.  A group of Jewish elders were "in charge"  of many matters in Terezin and had to organize many things like food distribution, electricity and were in charge of  for example the commission that was responsible for the entertainment within the camp. 
So they supposedly got the right for self-determination but of course all the orders were given by the  camp commanders. Nothing was written down. All the orders were given orally. That way the commanders could easily wash their hands from responsibility, if that became necessary.

As you might have noticed the Jewish prisoners had to cooperate with everything that had to be done within the camp. They even got the task to make the deportation lists of people that were send to the East and by the East I mean other extermination camps like Auschwitz. How would it have felt if you had to put your own mother or daughter on that list?

Children were separated from there parents from the age of 10 till 15 and stayed in the 'children houses'. A reason to keep them away from their parents was to protect them against the trauma. 
Some Jewish prisoners tried to make living in Terezin a little more pleasant for the children. The children could draw and paint as a form of therapy. A woman, I unfortunately forgot her name, managed to store a suitcase with drawings of these children in the attic when she heard her husband was being sent to Auschwitz and decided to join him.
Unfortunately she died in Auschwitz. Luckily her husband survived the war and went back for the drawings. The drawings show that a lot of children of Terezin were perfectly aware of what was happening and that  they were aware of the chance that they would not survive.

Poetry by one of the children of Terezin.

There was a man, Hans Kraza, in the Jewish community who loved music and who loved working with children. He also tried to '"save" the children from the trauma by keeping them occupied. He started the group Brundibar which means Bumblebee. The children performed several times and the group was a success. Their last performance was done for the red cross committee in 1944, not long before the end of the war. The purpose of this performance was to cover up the stories that were going around in the world about the bad conditions in the concentration camps.

Brundibar: a children's opera directed by Hans Kraza.

Another drawing by one of the children.
'I have not seen butterflies around here.'

The whole village had been prepared for this visit of the red cross committee and the village was made to look like a 'spa town' . The prisoners who were in bad conditions were sent away. They would not make such a good impression. Only the healthy prisoners were allowed to walk on the street and those who were allowed to walk around on the street were told exactly what they could and could not say. The tours around the camp also took a pre-scheduled root and the visitors were tricked into thinking that this was a destination camp and not a pre-transportation camp. 




After the performance, and Brundibar probably performed really great, the group did not receive a bouquet of roses but was sent, as whole, to the extermination camp in Auschwitz.

None of the teachers who dedicated their time in Terezin to helping, educating and entertaining the children, since the children also lost all their rights, survived.

Thus, Terezin was less bad than for example Auschwitz but it wasn't the nicest place to be either. There were some prisoners who managed to escape. Rumors go that someone escaped and traveled to Prague and came back to warn the people at Terezin and tried to tell everyone truth, but the story goes that the people chose not to believe it.

Propaganda drawing

The Jewish prisoners who had a talent for drawing were used to make propaganda drawings for the camp, which of course did not portray the reality. 

The truth

Some of the artists managed to smuggle some material back to their dorms and it was there that they drew what was really going on and some of them managed to smuggle some drawings outside of Terezin. Others hid their drawings underneath the floor planks. 
Drawings are still being found during renovation processes. These drawings depicted what really happened at Terezin and helped to spread the stories about the terror.

A German actor, that was also one of the prisoners, was used to make a propaganda movie, which consisted of both German actors and Jewish prisoners. Non- Jewish people with dark hair were specifically chosen to play in the movie together with the Jews and Terezin was depicted as a true paradise where people were constantly entertained, could lie in the sun and could make walks through the park, do sports etcetera.

We went to the Terezin ghetto museum but it was to big to see every thing within the limited time we got. We had about an hour, or less but I don't exactly recall, and not even a day would have been enough. There's so much to see and there's so much to read. It is definitely worth a long visit!











The truth about Terezin is that it was a terrifying place. 

'I don't want to go there. I think I will become really sad and I think it's too depressing'. That's what some people said when they heard about the visit to the concentration camp that I had planned.

Yes ofcourse it isn't a happy place to be but I am very glad I took this tour around Terezin. I got to sense a tiny bit of the terror, that is of course not even possible to comprehend, that took place in this important pre-transportation propaganda camp.

During the tour someone asked our tourguide about the other minority groups, such as the gypsies, in Germany. 'Were they send to Terezin too?'  Our tourguide told us that there were no other minority groups in Terezin only Jews (even though some of them were Christian) and that there were special camps for the different minority groups.

Our tour guide who was really funny and really dedicated to her work and very involved, but this is not a story about her, told us she tried not to make too many jokes, even though it was hard for her because it was obviously in her nature, during the tour because it's a serious matter.

Yes, it is a serious matter. 

It seems a bit crazy but people live in Terezin nowadays, whole families with children. In the houses that used as dormitories for the prisoners. The town still gives you this very weird feeling when you walk through it and I think that if I would live there I would consistently fear being haunted by the ghosts of the 350 000 Jews that lost their lives there.


I think it would be really hard to live happily and to forget what had happened there. But maybe these people live there because they don't want to forget?  I don't think people will ever forget what has happened from 1939 till 1945.  And I don't think any one should ever forget what has happened.

People let the Holocaust happen,
but let's never forget that it happened.
And let's consider it a lesson.

Let's never repeat history.