The day began with an hour drive to the fortress at Terezìn, located northwest of Prague. It was built between 1780 and 1790, by Maria Teresia’s son Joseph II, to protect Prague from the Prussians descending from the north. He named it in her honor. Recall I wrote about Maria Teresia, the last Habsburg monarch who ruled from 1740-1780 in my seventh blog- Viennese Waltz. Terezìn consists of two parts, the Small Fortress and the walled Main Fortress located on opposite sides of the Ohre river. The Small Fortress was a star-shaped, thick-walled prison, which only had sparse usage over the years. Its most infamous prisoner was the assassin of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in 1918, which triggered the start of World War I. During World War II the Gestapo used it as a political prison. We did not visit this prison, and spent our time in the Main Fortress.
Fortress at Terezín
Our guide for today was Jirina, and her driver Zdenek. Jirina volunteered that she was Jewish, in fact the self-proclaimed, most sought after guide by Jewish tour groups. She was born at the end of World War II, and lived her entire life in Prague. She has a Phd, her son works for the Gates Foundation in various parts of the word, and her daughter lives in Mountain View, CA – she visits her every year in January and February. She met Bill Clinton while going to school – I believe they were classmates. She and the people of Prague liked Bill very much – he made quite an impression in his visit to Prague.
Clinton visited Prague in 1994 to meet with the new democratically elected president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel. As the visit was ending, Clinton and Havel attended a jazz performance by one of the top Czech jazz bands at the Reduta Jazz Club near the National Theatre adjacent to the river. They performed a set of American and Czech standards. After the performance, Havel presented Clinton with an engraved Czech-made saxophone and invited him to jam with the band….which he did. It was an impromptu performance of Summertime from Porgy and Bess – everyone seemed delighted. I found a video of the performance on YouTube and was surprised how well Clinton could play. But, let’s get back to Terezín…….
The Main Fortress was originally designed to house 5,000 people, including military personnel, their families, and the various support services – it was basically a small city. It never achieved full functionality and was never under siege. In 1941, the Gestapo modified Terezìn to serve as a ghetto and concentration camp for communists, dissidents, gays, and eventually Jews. They drafted more than 300 Jewish craftsmen to modify the buildings and to build accommodations for 40,000 occupants. They were led to believe that by working for the Gestapo, they and their families would be ‘safe’ and treated well. Not so. After completing the project, they were all loaded into train box cars and transported to Auschwitz where they were gassed upon arrival. The Gestapo wanted to make sure that information of what was going on in Terezìn would be buried.
Hitler positioned Terezìn as a model Jewish city with a rich and fulfilling lifestyle. In reality, it was a concentration camp and a way station or distribution center for moving occupants to work camps, medical experimentation centers, and the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau. More than 200,000 Jews passed through this center. At its peak, it held as many as 55,000 people. The quarters were so tight, sanitation so primitive, and food supplies so minimal, that as many as 20% died from disease, malnutrition, and abuse by the guards. Many of the residents were scientists, writers, intellectuals, musicians, actors, artists, and leaders in their community. In fact, some had requested to be sent here, fearing that any other alternative was going to be worse. They formed a community as best they could, with theatre performances, four different orchestras, and art exhibitions. Since most could carry only a minimum of personal belongings, they arrived with their instruments or tools, along with their best suit and dress. So if you were to take a snapshot of a symphonic performance, you would find an audience of well dressed, seemingly happy people. The Nazis used this in a propaganda film to demonstrate to the rest of the world how wonderful life was for the Jews of Terezìn.
The fortress’s central square was covered with tarp canopies for the slave labor force – each working 12 or more hours each day. One of several activities was the sorting and distribution of clothing confiscated from Jews throughout Germany. The goods were sent here, sorted, mended, and then sent out to German citizens throughout the country who were suffering or had lost their possessions during Allied bombing raids.
While Terezìn was not officially a death camp –many people died. There was no space to bury the bodies as prescribed by Jewish practice. The bodies were cremated at one of four ovens in the crematorium. The ashes were scraped into cubical, cardboard boxes, labeled, and stored in an ammunition storage bunker that was converted to serving as a columbarium. As the war was ending, the Nazi’s frantically worked to hide their ill deeds. They conscripted the camp’s Jewish children to carry the boxes down to the river and to dump the ashes into the river.
Today, Terezìn looks more like a ghost town with most of the buildings unoccupied. The central square has park-like qualities with trees and poorly maintained grass. The town has tried to attract residents and businesses, but its location relative to other towns and cities, as well as its history, makes it a difficult location. Visitor accessible sites include the History of Terezìn Museum, the crematorium, the storage area of the boxed ashes, the railroad track bringing in and transporting out carloads of people, a clandestine synagogue that was never discovered by the guards, and a snack shop.
Our first stop, the History Museum, had an air of mournfulness as if we were in a sacred place, encouraging quietness, only whispering….as we tried to absorb the magnitude of the suffering people encountered. It refreshed my dismay with humankind and its intrinsic capacity to inflict unfathomable pain and suffering on others. It’s moments like these that suggest that humankind has little future but to destroy itself.
Artwork by the children of Terezìn
On our way to the upper floor, the staircase was wallpapered with a mosaic – a few of the 6,000 drawings that the children of Terezìn produced to describe what they saw in the camp. The showcases on the upper floor tied the photos of children to his/her picture – removing any abstraction, making it real. One boy, Frantšek Bass, fourteen years old, wrote the following poem, just days before he was transported to Auschwitz and gassed on October 28th, 1944.
A little garden,
Fragrant and full of roses.
The path is narrow
And a little boy walks along it.
A little boy, a sweet boy,
Like that growing blossom.
When the blossom comes to bloom,
The little boy will be no more.
Frantšek Bass (September 4, 1930 – October 28, 1944, Auschwitz)
This was just one of tens of photographs of boys and girls and their self-created epitaphs as evidence of their existence. In the center of the room was a map of the areas associated with Terezín – mostly Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Jirina pointed out there were at least 400 concentration camps, large and small, but only three death camps.
Concentration and death camps connected to Terezín
The adjacent room displayed more sketches and drawings. These were created by artists who, with stolen art supplies, were determined to capture what life was really like in the camp. Jirina told us the story of these artists.
Prisoner artist depicting life in the camp
Horrific conditions
The Nazi regime was under a lot of international pressure to allow the International Red Cross to examine the camps to confirm that people held there were treated in compliance with the 1929 Geneva Convention. Ultimately, Swiss delegates of the Red Cross plus two representatives from Denmark were given invitations to visit two camps – Terezìn and Auschwitz. In preparation, the Nazis beautified Terezìn along a very prescribed path, like a Hollywood set, depicting life as idyllic, with store windows filled with foods and other goods. The visit occurred on June 23, 1944. The delegation was so impressed they concluded there was no reason to visit Auschwitz, and canceled that part of the trip. At the end of the Terezìn tour, the Jewish artists smuggled several drawings depicting real life in Terezin, to the delegation. This clueless delegation turned around and confronted the Nazis with the drawings. The Nazis discounted the validity of these drawings, claiming that any camp has some dissidents who want to create problems. The Red Cross believed them, and left. Shortly after, the artists and their family members were collected and transported to Auschwitz and executed. As Jirina was telling the story, her seething dislike for the Red Cross could not be disguised. Several times during the day she kept repeating “I will never give the Red Cross any money!”
As we walked through the exhibit together, I took out my iPhone to take a panoramic photo, she dropped a little comment “If they hadn’t killed six million of us, we would have invented the iPhone and it would have been available six years earlier!” Hmmm, a lot of pent-up emotion.
Accommodations in camp
Next, we saw a typical living space in one of the barracks. The one we saw was specifically for women. As you can see in the photo above, each person was given less than 10 square feet of space.
Memorial cemetery
Crematorium
The crematorium which contained four ovens, was located at the edge of the fortress, adjacent to a cemetery, which is now a memorial to those who died in the camp. The cemetery served as the burial spot until the number of dead exceeded the available space. They switched to cremation to solve the space problem. As I mentioned above, the ashes were put into cardboard boxes and moved into storage at the nearby columbarium… our next stop.
The secret synagogue. Damaged by flooding of the river
Seeing the racks of stacked boxes, gave it an eerie air. The most interesting display was a large plaque put up in 2015, honoring the family of Josef and Anna Korbel. A very interesting story. Notice the name Madeleine Korbel Albright at the bottom.
Railroad tracks used to bring in and send out victims of the holocaust
Ashes of those who died in the concentration camp
Madeleine was born Marie Jana Korbel in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1937. She and her family moved to England at the start of World War II, and she was raised Catholic. After the war, the family returned to Czechoslovakia for a short time, fleeing again as the communists came to power. This time they moved to Denver, Colorado, where her father became a professor at the University of Denver. Fast forward. She entered politics in 1972, working with well-known personalities including Senator Edmond Muskie, national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Governor Michael Dukakis during his presidential bid in 1988. In 1992, President Bill Clinton appointed her as U.S. representative to the United Nations. Four years later, Clinton nominated her for Secretary of State – the first woman to serve in that position. She served in that capacity until 2001, and you will still find her weighing in on key national and international issues. She acquired the name Albright with her marriage to Joseph Albright, who eventually divorced her in 1983. She chose to keep the name Albright.
The Madeleine Albright family plaque
While she was serving as Secretary of State in 1997, the Washington Post discovered that her parents were born Jewish. They converted to Catholicism in response to the holocaust to protect the family, and hid that fact from their children as many others had done. This is a story we’ve heard repeated several times from our guides. Shortly after discovering her history, she visited Terezìn and met her surviving relatives. Walking down discovery lane, Albright learned that 24 of her relatives, including three grandparents, had died following their deportation to Terezìn. During her visit to Terezìn in 2012, the family installed the plaque bearing the names of her relatives.
Driving back to Prague on this very exhausting, emotional day, we decompressed by sharing a bottle of wine with Jirina while listening to a few of her stories and her take on the direction the Czech government was taking. She made it clear she does not like their current President (Miloš Zeman) – who she claims to be a drunk, and moving the country towards an authoritarian rule, emboldened by what Trump is doing in the USA. She did give him credit for rejecting Ivanna Trump’s (ex-wife, born in Czechoslovakia) proposal to be appointed Czech Ambassador to the United states).
Our dining venue on the river
Great setting. Great meal. Great friends.
That evening, we made our way across the Charles Bridge to a riverside restaurant, directly on the other side of the river from our hotel. The setting was beautiful with the bridge as a back drop, and the food memorable. A thunderstorm with a heavy downpour hit us during our meal – our waiter graciously came over with an open umbrella to protect us from the spray, while suffering the worst of it himself. As we were enjoying our dessert and coffee, the storm ended and left a beautiful rainbow with one end anchored on the Charles Bridge. Perhaps there is hope for a better future for mankind.
Rainbow to caption our adventure
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