Prague: Theresienstadt

I am beginning to feel ready to go home. We left Toronto two weeks ago last night and have had an intense round of Berlin, Warsaw, Krakow, Vienna, and Prague. Tomorrow we will go to Dresden for just overnight, go on to Berlin for two nights, and then home. We have had several very powerful experiences, the strongest without doubt being at Auschwitz. Yesterday we spent four hours at the fortress town of Terezin, the place called Theresienstadt by the Germans. The site is comprised of two distinct fortified structures: the so-called small fortress, the place used as a prison for political prisoners by the Germans, and the large fortress, the actual town, used by them as a ghetto or camp. Both were built in the late 18^th century by the Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II in preparation for a coming war with the Prussians. From that time on it was a military barracks, walled and strongly fortified.

We were part of a nine person group tour which started out from the Intercontinental Hotel at the edge of the former Jewish area of Prague.  Our guide, Vida, who grew up under the Soviet regime in Czechoslovakia, was told at the age of 14 by her parents that she is Jewish. Her father was a member of one of the many Prague families that was sent to Theresienstadt in 1941. In 1944 he was sent to Auschwitz with a large contingent of Czech Jews. Because he was young and in relatively good condition he was one of the approximately 1,500 men and women who were chosen for slave labour when the Czech camp was “liquidated” in August. In early 1945 he was sent from there to Buchenwald again as a slave labourer, escaped capture, and was hidden by a family in Pilsen, later liberated by the Americans. Under the Soviets, Jews, like other groups, were not allowed to practice their religion; as well there were other discriminations against Jews that led Vida’s parents, who themselves were non-religious, to underplay their Jewish heritage. Vida was interested though and became involved with the existing remnants of the community, despite the concern of her parents and the strong opposition of her older brother. With the fall of the communist regime the freedom to practice one’s religion was restored to all citizens.

The tone of Vida’s approach to her people’s history before, during, and after the Nazi period differed considerably from that of Andrezij, our guide in Warsaw. He seemed to be imbued with a living awareness of the tragedies that had befallen Polish Jews. Vida, on the other hand, spoke throughout in a determinedly up-beat manner about the Czech people’s tolerant approach to Judaism throughout the past century and presumably beyond. She related details of the incarceration of Jews from Prague and later from other countries at Theresienstadt, of later deportations to the Baltic States and to Auschwitz, and of the epidemics of typhus and “spotted fever” that swept the camp even as liberation came. We watched a film partially of clips from a movie made by the SS depicting happy Theresienstadt inmates playing soccer before an enormous crowd, children cheerfully cavorting in a park, and well-dressed ladies chatting over a cup of tea. The clear intention of the film was to assure the international community of the Nazis’ good treatment of Jews who had been removed from their homes: the government has given a lovely spa town to the Jews to live in according to their own ways. In the version that we saw, the clips of that film were juxtaposed with stills of drawings and paintings done by children and by the many artists resident there. These conveyed a radically different picture: nightmare scenarios of starving, dispirited men, women, and children, crowded into rooms filled with bunks, and lining up for inadequate food in open courtyards.

The guides that we have encountered during our travels exemplify for me, each in her or his own way, some of the complexity of how Europeans currently deal with their experiences of the past century. Martin Jander, a non-Jew from a family of Nazi sympathizers, takes interested tourist to sites in Berlin which relate to the history of the Jews in Germany. He communicates quite passionately his conviction that much more could have been done by ordinary Germans to help the Jews during the Nazi period and his disdain for conventionally spouted ideas that people simply didn’t know what was happening. Andrezij, grandson of a Jew who escaped into the USSR and became a dedicated communist, son of a mother who was a sceptic of the worker’s paradise and who married a non-Jewish Pole, is at 28 a fully self-identified Jew who volunteers in Warsaw to teach people about the tragedies suffered by his people. In Krakow, Jakub, who though a non-Jew, found after his university years an empty niche (as there are so few Jews resident in the Krakow area), and developed his business in genealogy and touring for mostly non-Europeans Jews interested in tracing their roots. His touring approach is informative but decidedly uninvolved. In Prague Vida, daughter of secular Jews, married to a non-Jewish Czech, seems to embody what she proclaims to be the Czech ready acceptance of all cultures and religions. The tenor of her remarks was factual, informative, and interesting, but with little of the personal intensity or compassion one felt when touring with Martin or Andrezij, for example.

Theresienstadt was a ghetto with its own special features but like all of the places devised by the Nazis to segregate Jews from Aryans, it was a destination which doomed the vast majority of its inhabitants to a life of deprivation of every kind, and ultimately to death by starvation, disease, or in the case of those deported later to Auschwitz, within the gas chambers.

We have taken quite a few photos at Auschwitz and at Theresienstadt, for example, which I have not posted as the blog format that I have gives me little control over their order. I plan to post them later under a different blog name which I will post within this one.