Terezin

Resuming my narrative of last October, I left the village of Konigstein by train, winding slowly through the sunny morning fog up the Elbe, and within a few miles I had crossed into the Czech Republic. Europe’s freedom of movement area, the Schengen Zone, is a masterstroke of policy, perhaps my favorite international agreement, and one that I hope is a template for us all to emulate. However, I was not going to a happy place that day. The train pulled into Litomerice, from which I would have to walk to the town of Terezin, known more famously by its German name: Theresienstadt.

Terezin is a perfectly-preserved relic of the Austrian Habsburg empire, built as a fortress in 1780 to control access points along roads into the Bohemian plain. Named for the Empress Maria Theresa, mother of Marie Antoinette, the town consists of an immaculate array of stellar fortifications enclosing a planned town designed to host a large garrison. But Terezin is not famous for any battle or siege. Instead, it is remembered as a concentration camp, or as the Nazis euphemistically called it, a “transit ghetto.”

Here in Terezin, an enormous percentage of Europe’s Jews, as well as many other political prisoners, were deported to live in a paltry act of propaganda theater – the community of prisoners was allowed to organize itself, and the Nazis made a great show out of Terezin as a sort of ‘humane’ Jewish camp, were children went to school and people lived in the town – a town which had of course had all of the previous inhabitants unceremoniously evicted. But of course the reality was that conditions of overcrowding and deliberate mistreatment were so great that thousands died here. And the euphemism was, in a certain sense, accurate. Most of the people sent to Terezin were only staged there temporarily, and trains left constantly carrying people to the East, with its extermination camps and death squads.

Today, Terezin is silent. The town has people living in it, and it seems like a perfectly friendly place, but for the two days I was there it was as quiet as can be. Perhaps that is because the fog never lifted for a moment. I stayed in an enormous and quiet flat, and in the day I wandered all over the town, a grid of battered buildings under a grey gloom. In the grassy moats I found sheep, and, oddly enough, invasive nutria rats.

I visited the Gestapo’s prison for political dissidents, as well as the barracks in which the Jewish community were forced to live. Terezin is filled with artifacts of the cultural life of the camp, which held all in one place many of the greatest minds and creative artists of Europe. One composer wrote an entire opera which has survived in full, commenting on the political situation. Many of these intellectuals spent their time teaching the children, who produced scores of drawings depicting their life in the camp, which now paper the walls of the barracks.

I found a graveyard shadowed by a looming menorah, and I even found a memorial set up by the Red Army to the Soviet troops who liberated the camp.

Finally, I walked across the countryside to read a train platform, only to discover there was no way to buy tickets there, so I had to walk a couple of miles in the other direction to get back to Litomerice. But this turned out to be a valuable and rare chance to get out of town and off the transit path and into the normal flat countryside of Czechia, with its quiet villages and green fields of vegetables.