Terezin, Czechia

On our second day in Prague we took a bus tour through the lovely Czech countryside to the small town of Terezin. It was built in 1780 as a military fortress by Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II and named for his mother, Empress Maria Theresa. In German it is known as Theresienstadt (Theresa's City).

It was never attacked by the Prussians and later became a camp for political prisoners.

In 1940 the Nazis converted it into a Gestapo prison and in 1941 a Jewish ‘ghetto’ was established there. Although it wasn’t an extermination camp, over 33,000 people died there from horrible overcrowding, disease, and starvation. In all, 150,000 people were sent there, including 15,000 children. About 88,000 were later transported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps.

Our guide emphasized that although it wasn’t a ‘death camp,’ it was full of unspeakable misery and terror. I was touched by a display of children’s drawings. Some were stark depictions of the camp, others hopeful, happy drawings of their lives before imprisonment. The adults in the camp worked tirelessly to make the children’s lives as normal as possible in a grotesquely abnormal setting. They would teach school, prepared to stop in an instant if a guard appeared.

Sobering is too weak a word to describe the feelings while visiting Terezin. When I was in high school, we would glibly parrot, “Man’s inhumanity to man” as the most likely theme of any serious work of literature. Can such horror be adequately described?