Terezin Concentration Camp

After crossing the border into the Czech republic.  The first thing you notice when you cross the border is that every truck stop has a “non-stop” casino and features ridiculously overpriced bathrooms with Berlin wall style fortifications to keep non-payers out.  We even had trouble leaving one of the washrooms we went in – it looked, for a few minutes, like everyone who had gone through the huge metal turnstile was doomed to spend the rest of their lives trapped in a Czech toilet.  Fortunately, we figured out that the turnstile went both ways, and that you didn’t have to pay to exit as well.

Terezin is a fortified town north of Prague – built by the Hapsburgs when the Czechs were just another part of the Austrian Empire.  When the Nazis took over what was then Czechoslovakia, they turned the entire town into a Jewish Ghetto and concentration camp.  All 7000 residents were evicted, and soon great numbers of political prisoners and Jews were moved in.  The Nazis used Terezin as a propaganda set – the ideal ghetto – to show the Red Cross that the Jews were well treated in their new homes, segregated from the rest of the population.  It was a fraud – most of the people housed in Terezin were shipped to extermination camps like Auschwitz.  Of the 15,000 children who lived in Terezin, fewer than 100 survived to be liberated at the end of the war.  The Ghetto Museum is a former Jewish boys’ dormitory filled with art and writing from the children who had lived here, and whose lives were senselessly snuffed out by the Nazi killing machine.

One of the many pieces of art work by children from the Terezin concentration camp.  The children liked to make drawings of life before the camp.

Another image from the Terezin Ghetto Museum

The memorial cemetery outside the Small Fortress of Terezin.

When Terezin was liberated by Russian soldiers, a typhoid epidemic was just getting underway - many of the soldiers died as well, and are memorialized in Terezin beside some of the Jewish victims.