Prague Oct 09 - Visit to TEREZIN

It strikes me as strange that decisions are often arrived at in a random way but turn out to be meaningful. We chose to take a daytrip out of Prague principally because of the continuing poor weather – most of the tours in the city were on foot so not mitigating the situation – the timing of the Terezin tour suited our return to the hotel to be picked up for the airport and so we chose it.
We packed our bags and left them in reception, where they were open to anyone adding drugs or explosives to taste but I still straight-faced the check-in clerk and assured her that they had been under my supervision throughout my stay.
At lunch time we were picked up by a Czech Basil Fawlty driving a mini-bus, we assumed that he was taking us to the centre of Prague where we would meet up with a bigger coach. His cheery disposition mirrored the weather and we felt that we would hardly miss Basil when he passed us onto another driver. It was not to be, he grimly instructed us to remain in our seats while others joined our party along with our guide.
Her first shock of the day was when she checked that we were all English speakers, clearly having been briefed that we were, alas no, there were three Spaniards amongst us, not a bad thing in itself but a nightmare for her in that she had prepared her script in English.
She apologised to them that she was not well prepared but her Spanish was excellent and both Julia and I found ourselves able to recognise the things that she had first explained in English when she reached that point in Spanish and to some extent when it had been Spanish first. Two out of the three Spaniards showed their appreciation of her efforts on their behalf by going to sleep.
The whole situation of Terezin became clearer in our minds rapidly, and chillingly, the town, which basically consisted of a small and large fort built long before the Second World War, was cleared on Hitler’s orders of all its Czech citizens and a Jewish ghetto was established there. It became, in turn, a propaganda device to refute the truth of the Third Reich’s policy towards the Jews and later a transit camp in the transport and final extermination of the Jews in the death-camps.
The large fort was basically the town and as such it housed the Jewish population with considerable overcrowding. It was this ghetto which was visited by the Red Cross and, it seems, passed by them as a humane situation, it also featured in Nazi propaganda films which showed a Jewish self governing community enjoying soccer matches and classical concerts. It beggars belief that this charade appears to have served the Nazi purpose but as my father would often say, “There’s none so blind as those who will not see!”
Anyway our trip arrived at the Small Fort first which was a prison even before the war, its claim to fame being the place where Gavrillo Princip the killer of Arch-duke Ferdinand was imprisoned. During the war it was the more repressive part of the system. It imprisoned anyone who attempted to escape from, or cause unrest in, the Ghetto. It was a dark miserable day as we arrived, we were issued with white plastic capes to keep off the rain but these mainly served to make us feel more like the arriving prisoners must have done.
Our guide turned us over to another guide who worked at the fort; she was well-informed but as darkly serious as her subject matter. The Spaniards had a Spanish speaker as their guide which our guide had phoned ahead to request.
Our tour started at the administration block, with typical Teutonic efficiency the inmates were recorded and given a number, only printed on their uniform not tattooed as in the death-camps. We next passed through the most haunting gateway, the old slogan still visible “Arbeit Macht Frei” into a prison courtyard. The shocking history of the place has left its mark and I cannot recall all that we were told – please look up the place if you feel the need. The bald facts are that about 32,000, not all Jewish - other minorities were also persecuted, people arrived here and were usually sent to a concentration camp later. 2,600 people were executed, starved, or succumbed to disease here. Of the 15,000 children sent there, a possible 1,100 survived. Two things that I remember from the guide will serve to make my point. In amongst the cells there was a room set out as a washing area with a long line of sinks and taps down one side, it seemed strangely out of step in its humanity but the guide explained that the room had been put in ready for the Red Cross inspection which never left the main Ghetto, however the authorities were only prepared to go so far; the taps were not connected to any water supply. The old firing range, used previously by the garrison to practise their marksmanship, was used as the site for all executions by firing squad. That felt grim enough but those unfortunates destined to die there were marched in to the area down a path which went between the guards’ apartment block and their swimming pool.
As the final part of the tour we were shown parts of the film made on the orders of the Nazis and directed by Jewish prisoner Kurt Gerron (a director, cabaret performer, and actor who appeared with Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel), it was meant to show how well the Jews lived under the "benevolent" protection of the Third Reich. After the shooting of the film, most of the cast and even the filmmaker himself, were deported to Auschwitz. Gerron and his wife were executed in the gas chambers on October 28, 1944. The film was not released at the time, but was edited into pieces that served their purpose, and only segments of it have remained, the version we watched was intercut with the chilling facts of the Final Solution.
After the small fort, from which only three prisoners escaped, we moved on to the main ghetto. Here, surprisingly, people live in the same blocks that were built during the war. We toured the ghetto museum where we read of the life of the inmates, they managed a strange form of normality in the Ghetto, magazines were published, operas were written and performed but many of the people credited with these shared the same fate, to die in an extermination camp. It was uplifting to read the very few who survived, amongst them was a young man who was transported to Auschwitz, escaped from there and returned to the Terezin Ghetto to warn the Jewish community but he was not believed.
The Ghetto area which had housed 7000 before the war held over 50000 at its height but that figure pales when you consider the transient nature of the population. Almost one-quarter of the approximately 141,000 Jews sent to Terezín between 1941 and 1945 died in the Ghetto, the victims of disease and starvation. The conditions in the camp were horrendous, despite continued efforts made by the inmates to improve their plight. Overcrowding, lack of adequate sanitation, poor housing, lice and other pests, allied to a poor, meagre diet led to constant epidemics, which often proved fatal for the older prisoners. For the majority of the Jews who were sent to Terezín, the ghetto was little more than a gateway through which they passed on their way to death. The figures make tragic reading: of the 15,000 children who passed through Terezin, only 100 survived; of the 88,000 deported from the camp (about half of whom went straight to Auschwitz), 84,500 were murdered; only 23,000 of the 141,000 sent to Terezín before April 1945 survived the war.
It was a quiet return to Prague and I hope I will never forget the experience. In these days of holocaust denial the survivors of the camps dwindle and soon they will not be there to show us their tattooed camp identification number. It is up to us to keep their memory intact. A friend of ours, Roger Harrison, was refereeing in Poland and took a day out to visit Auschwitz, he felt it was something that he should do rather than something to enjoy. I share his view and I remind you that someone once said, “Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them”