This morning, I said goodbye to my mom, and then spent most of my last day in Europe visiting the former ghetto and concentration camp in Terezin. As I learned, Terezin was first built as a military fortress and garrison town in the 18th century by Maria Theresa's son, hence the name, Terezin. The town was built in two parts: a smaller fortress, which served as a prison of enemies of the Hapsburg empire, and a larger fortress, which was a town with barracks for soldiers. When the Nazis overtook the fortresses during the Second World War, they were completely intact, and they realized that they didn't have to move a brick in order to turn the smaller and larger fortresses into a concentration camp and a ghetto. So, in 1940, the Nazis began to use the smaller fortress as a prison for political prisoners, and the larger fortress starting in 1941 as a Jewish ghetto. Besides the historical value of visiting the site, one main reason why I visited Terezin is that Zayde was an inmate at the Terezin ghetto at the end of 1945, and he was liberated from there as well--but more on that soon.
For those of you who have visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, you might remember that the place is often crowded with huge tourist groups talking and taking pictures, and also that many buildings at the former camp were reconstructed after the war. For those reasons, it was hard for me to imagine during my visit how the camp would have been like when it was operating during the war. Terezin, however, has remained completely intact since the war, and from what I saw today, is less frequently visited, so all the barracks and prison cells at the smaller fortress were open for viewing. This made the site very real, and on one hand, it was not hard to picture the events that took place in such a dark, fortified prison. On the other hand, the town of Terezin is situated in what's the otherwise picturesque Czech Republic, and today being a beautiful sunny day, it was hard to block out the beauty of the surroundings when looking at things like barracks, tiny prison cells, and false washrooms that the Nazis built to show to visiting officials.
The larger fortress, which is the former ghetto, though now a regular town, still contains all the buildings of the ghetto. I visited the archives at the Ghetto Museum to see if they could help me find anything about Zayde's time in Terezin. The man at the archives looked up Zayde's name and quickly found that Zayde arrived in Terezin on April 19th, 1945, just a little under a month from when he would be liberated. Still, even though he was only in Terezin for a few weeks, as I learned, the time that he was there was a very difficult one. Beginning on April 20th, 1945, transports arrived from concentration camps all over in what were called "Evacuation Transports"--the Nazis attempt to move their prisoners further from the lines of the approaching Allies. In these few weeks, the Nazis scrambled to murder however many people they could, and these transports to Terezin were such an attempt. Zayde may have been in one of these such transports, although it's a mystery to me why he arrived a day before these transports officially began.
In the former ghetto, I was able to walk the streets and see the buildings that Zayde very likely saw when he was in Terezin. For example, the site of the end of the rail lines into Terezin--this was where he would have gotten off the train and arrived in Terezin, and the surrounding buildings are exactly as they were in 1945. I was also able to see a recently discovered "secret synagogue," a small prayer room in the back of a building that was used covertly during the war. The walls of the room are painted with quotes from the Torah and the prayer services, and it was amazing to think of the people that stood in the same room, just a few decades earlier. As many of you probably know, Terezin was the ghetto that was used as the "show" ghetto for the Nazis--the same ghetto that was beautified and displayed to Red Cross officials in person and in the propaganda film, "A Gift of a Town." If only these officials had opened their eyes a little wider, perhaps Terezin would not have gone down in history as a place with two faces: a beautified exterior and a dark, cold, destructive interior. One last note--as I mentioned before, Terezin is a walled town, and you might remember that Zamosc, Zayde's place of living before the war, was a fortified town as well. The fortifications and layouts of the towns are hauntingly similar, and I wonder if Zayde had thought of this at all when he was imprisoned at Terezin.
Anyway, this will be my final post from Europe and my final post about this leg of the trip. The next and final leg will be a week in Israel, where I'm not only going to relax and see friends, but I also plan on visiting the Yad Vashem museum and archives to take in everything I've experienced as well as explore paths to more discovery. I'm sad to be leaving Europe, but I know that I'll have such a warm feeling of relief the moment I touch down in Israel. I can't wait!
BTW, the Red Cross inspection of Terezin resulted from a Danish request for info about Danish (Jewish) citizens who had been transported there. Otherwise, the Red Cross refused to take any role in aiding displaced Jews. The Danes, as you know, saved many Jews by secret ferry crossings away from the Germans.
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