Theresienstadt

In the selection of “special cases” to be protected from transportation to the death camps, Arendt sees the insidious acceptance of the principle that some lives were more important and worth saving than others. From the earliest days of Nazi domination exemptions from the rules laid down for “ordinary” Jews were being made. In order to minimize public outcry care was taken not to incarcerate Jews who had important connections both within and outside Germany. As well, Nazi Party members and other gentiles requested exemptions for particular friends or colleagues. Hitler had three hundred and forty “first rate” Jews assimilated to the status of Germans or of half-Jews. Though most of the latter category were deemed Jewish and treated accordingly, thousands were excepted from restrictions. Arendt contends that, “If the Jewish and Gentile pleaders of ‘special cases’ were unaware of their involuntary complicity, this implicit recognition of the rule, which spelled death for all non-special cases, must have been very obvious to those who were engaged in the business of murder. They must have felt, at least, that by being asked to make exceptions, and by occasionally granting them, and thus earning gratitude, they had convinced their opponents of the lawfulness of what they were doing.”

Making these distinctions helped to mollify a degree of discomfort among people in Germany and other western countries. For example, it could be said, especially in early days, that only Polish Jews were being deported from Germany, or only non-native Jews from France or Holland. As the hold of the SS over these countries and the collections of Jews intensified, however, such distinctions were less necessary.  But by 1941 the numbers of requested privileges had so multiplied that it was decided to create a ghetto for “prominent Jews” with considerably better conditions that those to which most Jews were subject. This was the original purpose of Theresienstadt. Later it was used as a showplace, inspected by the Red Cross, a veritable Potemkin village, designed to convince the world that ghetto or camp life was essentially humane. Special foods and other unusual items were given to the inmates during the visits of inspectors and taken away immediately afterward. The prisoners were cautioned to exhibit happiness and “normality” during these inspections.

An acclaimed Czech writer, Ivan Klima and his family were held from1941-5 at Theresienstadt. About 150,000, including 15,000 children lived there in its early years. Never good, over the course of the war conditions deteriorated, leading to death by starvation and disease of about 33,000. As new “important people” were sent to the camp, it was periodically “cleared” of less prominent groups. Designated for further transportation eastward, they were taken to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. By the end of the war only about 17,000 had survived their incarceration at Theresienstadt.

Ivan Klima wrote about his experiences during the war in an article published in the magazine, Granta, later republished in his book The Spirit of Prague. Ivan was almost eight old when the war began. Because the Germans had invaded Czechoslovakia earlier, various bans had already affected his life. His family could not leave Prague, he could not go to school, to the theatre, to movies, to the park, and could travel in the city only on the back of the bus. He had two Jewish friends living in the same building with whom he played. In September, 1941 his friend Lucy came running in tears to say that she and her family were leaving on a transport to Poland. His other friend, Tommy, left soon afterward. Neither was ever heard of again. In November his father, who was an engineer, was summoned for transportation. Rather than being sent to Poland he was taken to the nearby fortified town of Terezin to assist with the transformation of the military barracks into a concentration camp. Two weeks later Ivan, his mother, and his three year old brother were sent there as well.

From the beginning Theresienstadt had features different from other camps. The Klima family journeyed to Terezin by regular train rather than by the cattle cars then in common use for the transportation of Jews. They were allowed greater latitude in bringing their belongings. Ivan brought his favorite books and his mother and the other women in the transportation brought large pillows for their families to sleep upon. Generally though Spartan, conditions were better than those in other ghettos or camps. Very soon, however, the available spaces had been taken and as others “special cases” were sent to Theresienstadt, the periodic gleaning of families in the camp began. As mentioned in an earlier post, the choice of those to be transported into Poland was decided by the Judenrat. What underlay the sets of decisions that kept the Klima family in the relative safety of Theresienstadt to the end of the war is unknown. In the four years of his incarceration in the camp Ivan saw all of his friends, boys and girls, taken “for transport,” taken as he discovered after the war, to Auschwitz for extermination. His closest friend, Arieh, son of a camp prisoners’ committee, was shot at the age of 12. Thousands of others died while in the camp of starvation and disease, especially in the later stages of the war.

In writing years later about his experiences, Klima reaches conclusions similar to those of Hannah Arendt about the corrosive effects of Nazi power: “The moment a criminal regime disrupts the norms of law, the moment crime is sanctioned, when some people, who are above the law, attempt to deprive others of their dignity and of their basic rights, people’s morality is deeply affected. The criminal regime knows this and tries to maintain, through terror, the decent and moral behaviour without which no society, not even a society governed by such a regime, can function....Every society that is founded on dishonesty and tolerates crime as an aspect of normal behaviour, be it only among a handful of the elect, while depriving another group, no matter how small, of its honour and even its right to life, condemns itself to moral degeneration and, ultimately, to complete collapse.”

Immediately after the war the country fell under the domination of the Soviet regime, one totalitarian power replacing another. Coming to maturity within a closed society bordered by “barbed wire,” Klima kept his inner self alive through his writing, stories which were prohibited in Czechoslovakia until after the 1989 collapse of the Soviet influence. His characters reflect the split consciousness and outer lives needed to navigate a society boundaried by the strictures of an all-encompassing ideology. 

Throughout his life Klima struggled with the impact of his early physical incarceration: “When you live with death all around you, you must, consciously or unconsciously, develop a kind of resolution. The knowledge that you can be murdered tomorrow evokes the longing to live intensively; the knowledge that the person you are talking to can be murdered tomorrow, someone you may be fond of, leads to the fear of intimacy. You build in yourself an inner wall behind which you conceal what is fragile in yourself: your deepest feelings, your relationship to other people, especially to those closest to you.”