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Update from Eastern Europe - Day 2 - Terezin

05/08/2019 04:35:26 PM

May8

Rabbi Jonathan Biatch

Wednesday May 8, Our Day in Terezin

Our bus traveled an hour north of Prague to the concentration camp named Terezin. This place is a former military fortress that served as a “model” concentration camp the Nazis used to conceal the horrors of the Final Solution.

The springtime scenery is patterned with fields of canola plants, the bright yellow petals that you see in the photo. The beauty and calm of that country ride was shadowed by the infamy of Terezin as a place where hundreds of thousands of people died during the Holocaust.

Formerly a walled army garrison built in the late 1700’s and then called Theresienstadt, it was intended to protect bridges over the nearby Ohre and Elbe Rivers from military attack, and its citadel and castle structure once housed more than 5,000 soldiers in preparation for war. Oddly enough, the fortress never came under military attack.

In the mid-1800’s, it became a prison, and then specifically a military prison during WW I. It was not until the Nazi invasion of this region, known as the Sudetenland (because many ethnic Germans lived there), that the area came under the interest of the Gestapo to create a concentration camp on that site. From 1939-1941, there was much construction work to accommodate the thousands of inmates that they anticipated coming there.

The most shocking facet of Terezin is its history as a “model” concentration camp. The Nazis shielded from the world their Final Solution by enabling the International Red Cross (ICRC) to inspect the camp and see how ‘pleasant’ life was for those interned there. The Jewish inmates were forced to create counterfeit social and intellectual lives consisting of concerts and orchestras, soccer leagues and matches, lectures and other aspects of a ‘normal’ life only for the benefit of the ICRC’s visit. The reality is that more than 33,000 people died in the town from population density, disease, and malnutrition. Terezin is preserved today as a museum and living reminder of the terrors of the Holocaust, and a memorial to those who lived and died there.

Full capacity of the town of Terezin is around 6,000, yet at times there were more than 60,000 Jews of  various ages living there. That is the reason that so many people died from malnutrition and disease.

At the site there are two large cemeteries, each honoring both the Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Nazi war machines. There is also a crematorium where the Nazis destroyed the sacred vessels/bodies of Jews and others who had died.

This was a somber day for us who visited this place today. Oddly enough, our visit today took place on the anniversary of the victory over the Nazis in Europe, which was May 8, 1945

April 16, 2024 8 Nisan 5784