Saturday 2.21, Terezin

According to Mr. Crane, "Terezin is all smoke and mirrors." This camp was different from the others that we saw. Located about one hour outside of Prague, Terezin is a Czech town that was taken over by the Nazis where Jews and Christians from the Czech Republic, and German Jews were sent. That isn't the entire story. For example; many German Jews in the camp paid for their train tickets to Terezin, and brought their valuables along with them. It was advertised as a day spa, which Jews could not attend as per the Nuremberg laws. The German Jews would arrive, have their valuables confiscated, and would be shuffled into the barracks where Czech Jews, all of who had been forcibly shipped to the camp, awaited. Conditions were, as one would expect in a camp, terrible. Prisoners had to deal with cramped living space, no personal freedoms, disease, and death. However, in some ways, the camp seems less bad than Auschwitz or Birkenau superficially. There was an active theater group there that performed plays and comedy routines. There were musical groups that performed regularly. People who were artists on the outside were put to work making art, albeit propaganda art for the Nazis. Those who died at the camp, Jewish or Christian, were afforded to a proper burial. Compared to the bleak hopelessness of the other camps, Terezin seems less bad. However, there is a decidedly more sinister side to the camp.
Prisoners at Terezin were helping to construct gas chambers at Theresienstadt, a nearby fortress being used by the Nazis as a prison camp used to hold Russian POWs and dissidents from Terezin. Although the gas chambers were never completed, thousands were executed at Theresienstadt. Many were tortured to death. Thousands more were shipped to Auschwitz to be gassed there. When Typhus broke out in Terezin, hundreds died as a result. "Not so bad" is only skin deep.
The ruse was however, good enough to fool the Red Cross. The Nazis made a propaganda film showing healthy men showering, people gardening, nurses treating old and sick patients, children playing, musicians performing, and residents looking generally content. When the Red Cross inspected Theresienstadt, they found that prisoners had a large shower room, and a room with individual sinks and mirrors; conditions that far exceeded the Geneva conditions for treatment of prisoners in wartime. Based upon the film and inspection, the Red Cross gave the Nazis a favorable review. In reality, the healthy showering men were recent arrivals to the camp, who had yet to show the ill effects of months of a starvation diet. The garden was irrigated with water from a nearby river, where crematorium ashes were dumped. The garden in the film was essentially fertilized with the camp's dead. Children did not live a happy existence at Terezin; they were forced to labor at the camp or were shipped to be "Aaryanized" with German families. People starved to death, and typhus was rampant in the cramped conditions. In fact, the individual sinks in Theresienstadt weren't even hooked up to water!
The smoke and mirrors were enough to prevent the Red Cross from sounding a warning cry about concentration camps, which was one of the numerous reasons that death factories such as Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek could continue as they did. The Red Cross did not apologize for their oversight until the 1970's. How much of the blame for these events do they deserve?
Ultimately, the end result for many of the occupants of Terezin was the same for prisoners at many other concentration camps. What makes it unique is the level of illusion that surrounded the camp. One feels guilty seeing irony in events that occurred there, rather than the pure tragedy of other camps. It begs us all to be extra vigilant as genocidal groups today continue to try and pull the wool over our eyes.