A Reflection from Terezín Concentration Camp

Terezin is a small garrison town about 30 minutes outside of Prague. Despite the impressive fortifications, underground passageways and moat - this location never came under siege and was therefore never utilised as intended. Instead, Terezin found its purpose around 150 years later, housing political prisoners during WWI and victims of the Holocaust shortly thereafter. The prison fortress was transitioned into a Nazi run work and transit concentration camp in the early 1940s. More than 150,000 Jews from the Czech Republic and its borderlands passed through its gates and suffered intolerable cruelty within. 

This was my first experience visiting a Concentration Camp. I had never heard of Terezin/Theresienstadt, perhaps because it wasn't a "death camp" in the way we understand it and therefore was never central to the history books. However, it was a place of torture, subjugation, and hatred where around 35,000 people lost their lives to disease, malnutrition and maltreatment and a further 90,000 passed through on the way to extermination at Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Dachau any many others. A place people went to suffer before they went to die. 

In 1944 Terezin was used to manipulate the world into believing that Concentration Camps were not the horrific prisons of torture and death that they are now known to be. The International Red Cross was invited into the camp to see the humanity of the space. Propaganda films were created to exemplify the fair and safe conditions, directed by Jewish artists who were used for their talents and discarded when the Nazis had stolen enough. What the inspectors didn't know when they gave it a stamp of approval is that just prior to their arrival, massive beautification projects and renovations took place to give an air of comfort and normality. The inmates were coordinated into sports teams and clubs. Artists show-cased their work in the forms of paintings, literature and poetry; strengthening the illusion even more. To avoid the overcrowding, which was of course a constant reality in Terezin, 17,000 of the old and sickly were transited across the region to death camps, giving a false sense of space. Lying to the world about the reality of Terezin seems to be one of the great injustices perpetuated by the Nazis, for it permitted people to continue turning a blind eye to what so many knew to be true. It was a truth no one wanted to contemplate, much less believe. 

When I asked our guide what the local populations thought, he admitted that people knew what was happening. The train lines would stop in the town and Jews were forced to walk several kilometres to reach their new prison-homes. He explained that people did not want to believe something so horrendous could be true. I have contemplated many arguments which would use ideas of justice and morality to pass judgement on this claim. To me, it makes sense that people could refuse to believe the grim, dark, ugly things that were right in front of them, for to believe them would be to accept them in our world. We want to live in a world where the Holocaust could not happen. Sadly, we do not live in that world that so many of us try desperately to imagine. 

We live in a world where we must strive to understand hatred and indifference so that we may endeavor towards healing. To disbelieve does not change what really is. 

The town of Terezin has not has the transformation that other cities of conflict have had, perhaps because the pain was too great and the loss too deep for such a small and isolated place. What it is though, is a symbol of what we as humans are capable of. It is a reminder of what can happen when we perceive others to be unworthy of our respect. 

"Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world. But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you, So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also." Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet