By Eyal Feldman
Brendan and I took a powerful sightseeing tour to Terezin, or Theresienstadt, a World War II concentration camp and Jewish ghetto town located north of Prague. This former garrison town was built at the end of the 18th century by Emperor Joseph II as a system of military fortresses to protect Prague and the northern part of the country. However, when the Nazis took control of Czechoslovakia during World War II, they converted the whole garrison town into a concentration camp and Jewish ghetto. Jewish War Veterans, the elderly, musicians, artists, actors, and otherwise internationally famous Jews were sent here from all over Europe. It was considered Paradise Camp because it had slightly better conditions than all other Nazi camps though it served as a short transit camp and you were likely to be transported to a death camp within a few months.
Terezin is eerily preserved in it's 1940's state and is sparsely populated today feeling more like a quasi ghost town frozen in time as many of it's citizens are involved in the town as a Holocaust tourist site. During the 3.5 years the town served as a concentration camp more than 150,000 Jews were sent there. Although it was not an extermination camp about 33,000 people died in the ghetto itself, mostly because of the appalling conditions arising out of extreme population density and lack of adequate food and medicine. About 88,000 inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps that by the end of the war there were only 17,247 survivors only 123 children survived out of the 15,000 children sent there. This was our first visit to a concentration camp and it left an incredibly powerful impression on the psyche about how this place could exist the way it did. If you ever go to The Czech Republic make sure you get yourself over here, it only take an hour to get to from Prague and it will give you a deeper knowledge about life in the not so distant past about the horrific struggles so many normal modern people like yourself experienced during the war years.
near Small Fortress at Terezin