Terezin, Czech Republic

About an hour from Prague is the town of Terezin. It is a small town of about 2900 but holds a dark history. In 1780, the Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II ordered the building of a fortress here as protection against invading Prussian troops. He originally named it after his mother, Maria Theresa, from which the name Terezin comes.

The building consisted of a small fortress and a larger walled town area called the main fortress. Trenches and low lying areas around the fortress could be flooded for added protection and the walls of the fortress were planted in grasses so from a distance it blended with the environment of the times

The fortress was never under siege and in the latter half of the 19th century was used as a prison and eventually a political prison during WWI. 

When the Nazis began their occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, the small fortress became a prison for political enemies of the regime, anyone resisting or defying the Nazi rule. Eventually, many of the prisoners were shipped to extermination camps such as Auschwitz or Mauthausen.

Nazi officers barracks

The larger area, or the main fortress was emptied of residents and became a Jewish ghetto. A more likely description would be a holding area for the deportation of Jews to the extermination camps. 

After passing by the memorial graves of Jews and Christians alike, most with just numbers on them, we explored the small fortress first and a local guide gave us quite an introduction into what life would have been like there. Large overcrowded rooms that held a hundred or more prisoners at a time with one non-functioning toilet. When the mattresses became so infested and moldy, they were burned and prisoners slept on wooden planked bunks.

There were some executions by firing squad. Those who were executed or died at the facility were cremated and at first put in urns. When space and cost became too great, they used paper cones and emptied them into the river. 

Our group of about 40 entered one room and squeezed in as our guide indicated that normally there would have been more than twice that number kept in that cell. 

On one side of the fortress was a beautiful building, well kept, that had housed the Nazi generals and staff of the fortress as well as their families. Children would be playing behind a fence in a lovely grassy area or splashing in a pool in the summer while prisoners were dying just outside of their compound of malnutrition and a host of diseases.

Shower room

Once done exploring the small fortress, we bused a little ways to a museum in the ghetto area which is now inhabited by the small community of people who have chosen to live there. A museum offered a film that showed some of the activity of the time and a propaganda film done by the Germans to try to influence the Red Cross that the Jews were being well taken care of.

Some of the artwork was on display that the children of the ghetto had done and there were several handmade dolls as well that depicted the uniform of the day that had to include the yellow star to identify them as Jews.

Not quite as intense a tour as we had experienced at Mauthausen a few years ago but still, a dark time in the history of the country and this little town.