Tales of an Orchestra Den Mother | Part 10, Terezin

Thursday, April 21: Arbeit Macht Frei

I stared at the words painted above the gate and felt a chill envelop my heart. Arbeit macht frei. A lie. A jingoistic euphemism for horror. Though the people around me raised their cameras to take pictures, I could not bring myself to do so. It was too profane. 

After departing Leipzig that morning, we entered the Czech Republic where our first destination was the former Nazi concentration camp at Terezin. Of all the places on our itinerary, this one concerned us the most as parents. This was not because we thought it inappropriate for the kids to see. Rather, it struck at the heart of every parent's instinct to shield their children from ugliness in the world. 

However, our visit to Terezin was not quite what I expected.

Subterfuge

While it feels ghoulish to rank order degrees of atrocity, Terezin does not quite possess the notoriety of places like Dachau or Auschwitz. It is nonetheless a locus of suffering and infamous for a ruse perpetrated on the world by the Nazis. Although the reality of Nazi concentration camp horrors remained largely unknown until the camps were liberated by Allied soldiers at the end of the war, rumors of atrocities had already began to circulate by 1944. As a result, the King of Denmark and the International Red Cross demanded to inspect one of the camps. Foolishly, they allowed the Nazis to dictate the place and time. The Nazis offered up Terezin and a date for the inspection that allowed ample time for preparation.

Nazis had transformed the fortified Czechoslovakian town of Terezin into a Jewish ghetto. Although it was not an extermination camp, thousands perished due to extreme overcrowding, disease, and malnutrition. Prior to the inspection, the Nazis engaged in a “beautification” campaign. Thousands were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz to relieve the overpopulation. A fresh coat of paint was slapped on everything, phony shops and cafes were opened, and cultural activities were encouraged. When the Red Cross and Danish inspectors arrived on June 23, 1944, their movements were restricted to specifically embellished portions of Terezin so that the inspectors only saw what the Nazis wanted them to see. The subterfuge worked and the inspectors, evidently led by Mr. Magoo, departed satisfied that Terezin was a model internment camp. After the inspection, a Jewish filmmaker imprisoned in Terezin named Kurt Gerron was forced to memorialize the lie in a Nazi propaganda film, Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt ("The Führer Gives a City to the Jews"). When it was done, he and the other prisoners who created the film were sent to die in an Auschwitz gas chamber.

I expected that visiting Terezin would put all of us in the shoes of detainees in that Jewish ghetto. To my surprise, we did not visit the former ghetto at all.

Malá Pevnost: The Small Fortress

The walkway to the Small Fortress at Terezin.

Instead, we visited the neighboring "Small Fortress" at Terezin. It was originally built as a military fortification to check Napoleon's advance across Eastern Europe. It later served as a prison. During World War I, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip, assassin of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, was imprisoned there for four years before dying of tuberculosis in captivity. Falling under Nazi control during World War II, the Small Fortress became a Gestapo prison. Whereas the adjacent ghetto of Terezin was focused on Jewish prisoners, the Small Fortress offered equal opportunity internment for anyone deemed an enemy of the Nazis, from German dissidents who spoke out against the Party to Allied prisoners of war. It was overcrowded, cold, and home to frequent executions. Prisoners were used as slave labor to build implements of the German war machine.

Our tour guide was a young Czech whose accented English was filled with tonal flourishes that he wielded like aural boldfacing. "He sounds like Gru," observed The Bear. (Gru was the animated protagonist from Despicable Me voiced by Steve Carell.) She was not wrong and somewhat undermined the man's gravitas for me and Izzy. Nevertheless, our guide spoke with righteous anger about brutal conditions in the prison, dramatically emphasizing horrific statistics. He often paused to scan the impassive faces of his American guests while asking, "Do you understand?" He received stunned, silent nods in response. 

We explored one of the long tunnels designed to quickly move fortress defenders from place to place in battle. We saw Princip's cell. We stood in a stone cell designed for a single inmate that would have been overcrowded tenfold by the Gestapo. We trooped through the massive shower room where inmates would have been doused with unheated water in winter by their Nazi captors. ("These showers were built for hygiene," our guide emphasized, gesturing toward boilers for heating water that the Gestapo chose not to use.) We saw where firing squad executions were conducted, the damaged brick wall of the fortress showing physical evidence of those murders. Through it all, I stayed close to Izzy and The Bear to lend support as needed, but they handled the experience well.

"We're OK, you can stop hovering now," The Bear declared with an eye roll once the tour was complete.

The Christian and Jewish cemeteries outside the Small Fortress.

Before dismissing us, our guide thanked us for coming. "It is important for you to see this place and understand what happened here, because it cannot be allowed to happen again." He swept his gaze across the group, making eye contact with each one of us. "It is especially important today because Putin is another Hitler."

We heard variations on this statement multiple times during our stay in the Czech Republic.

As our bus departed for Prague, Izzy and The Bear were quieter than usual. 

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