Terezin--Pretending It Isn't So

Terezin was a garrison town built in the 18th century about an hour outside of Prague by Joseph II and named after his mother. We drove through a magnificent countryside, rich farmlands, only occasionally spotted with chemical plants. There are no Soviet styled cement buildings on the way. Picturesque.

It was a cold, bleak, gray day with scattered snow fall on the ground when we arrived at the Small Fort. This is where the political prisoners were kept by the Nazis. This fortress was so utterly stark: the solitary confinement cells were tiny, bare walls, no graffiti, no long poems etched into the endless gray. The barracks that held as many as 200 men, well, the only comfort was how tightly they were crammed in with each other, at least keeping each other warm. Nothing grew anyplace. It was barren.

We walked out to the meadows, passed a gallows, to the wall where political prisoners, those who resisted the Nazis, were shot by firing squads. We walked to the cemetery, where Russian soldiers who died in World War I are buried, where Jews are buried, where political prisoners are buried, some in individual graves, others in mass graves. Their bones turned to ash once the crematorium opened.

And we walked into a crematorium. It was horrifying. To see the evidence of the evil of human beings, to see how mechanized killing became. There is a smell throughout Terezin, it is the smell of death, unnatural death. My way of coping with the overwhelming feeling of despair, the cold, dank day, was to find an aesthetic with my camera, to find the beauty in the gas nozzles that fed the flames in the crematorium.

Then we went into the town of Terezin itself. This was taken over and made into a Jewish ghetto, mostly for older Jews transported into the town from all over Europe. What had been a garrison town, became a hell hole where every possible space was turned into a place to live. It didn't look as horrible as the small fort, because there are trees and open spaces, and a city square. But Terezin was used by the Germans to trick the International Red Cross into believing that the Nazis weren't treating Jews cruelly. We sat through a propaganda film produced by one of Germany's finest actors: a soccer game played by healthy men with happy children watching in admiration, women chatting over window sills, young lovers walking hand in hand. The Red Cross visited and issued a report in 1944 that all was well.

There is a Museum that has the artifacts of daily life on display--poetry, dolls, journals, drawings, paintings--and oral histories of survivors "One day a transport of children arrived in Terezin. It was so lovely to hear their voices. And then one day, they all disappeared." The artwork of the children is especially touching, because it is innocent and still reeks from hope. We had already heard the name of the transport, the number of people shipped to the camps, and the number of survivors: 1076 sent to Auschwitz, 34 survived; 798 sent to Dachau, none survived. Numb. I felt numb, as if the evil was too inconceivable to fully understand despite all of my years of fascination with this time in history. Being there, it was so real that it felt unreal.

Just about ten years ago, a clandestine synagogue was revealed in the back of a house. The chapel had been used secretly to perform funeral services. We stood in this tiny room with prayers of hope painted on the walls. I could not imagine having that much faith in God to sing his praises when life was so full of death, hatred, and fear.

Our guide told us that a woman had opened a kosher restaurant in Terezin, hoping that all of the Jewish tourists would enjoy the respite. But one is so consumed by the history that food is unimaginable, any comfort is, and the restaurant soon closed. We drove silently back to Prague.

The evil of the Nazis and the Holocaust should not be inconceivable, because if we don't recognize our capacity for evil, it lurks inside each of us, Hitler was not a freak, then it can happen again. And it is: in Darfur, in the former Congo, in any place where a primary identity is the only identity. When we as humans cannot see the commonality of being human.