And All the Rest from Prague

Mary and I returned to Prague from Romania on October 8th and spent another four days before returning to San Francisco. Highlights included our attendance at Prague's 'other' symphony, the Czech National Symphony, at one time headed by Rafael Kubelik. The standout of the evening was Matthias Goerne's singing of most of the songs from Mahler's Das Knabe Wunderhorn.

We hiked to the castle, visited St Vitus Cathedral, but missed the Jewish neighborhood because it was closed for Sukkot.

I had toyed with the notion of seeing Terezin but I wasn't sure that it would be a fitting end to such an otherwise enjoyable trip. But we went, and spend almost the entire day traveling to and from, as well as visiting several different parts of the Thieresenstadt concentration camp. Terezin is the Czech name for the town, Thieresenstadt the German name for the camp.

We arrived on an appropriately gloomy day. Standing in front of a park that fronts on the main exhibit building, I noticed leaves falling to the ground. This was a stark reminder of soot, falling to the ground like snow in Schindler's List. But it was the ash of women, men, and their children, destroyed in the ovens.

A prison barracks before the Nazis took it over, Terezin housed the notorious Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo in June, 1914. Princip died of tuberculosis in this camp in 1918. Death from disease and starvation pervaded Terezin through and past the 1945 liberation. More deaths of inmates occurred in May and June of 1945 (of Typhoid, incurred earlier in the year) than the entire year prior, and this was after the end of the War.

The Germans used the camp as a "showcase" for a visiting Red Cross delegation in 1942. They also produced a movie showing the Jewish inmates playing soccer and enjoying outings. The reality was uncovered by artist inmates, surreptitiously drawing scenes from daily life. These are devastating in their quantity. Apparently a few of these got out to the Red Cross team before their visit. They showed the drawings to their Nazi hosts. After the Red Cross departure, all of the identifiable artists were put to death. And the movie? Joseph Goebbels refused to let it screen, because it pictured Jews enjoying sports and conversations, like 'normal people'. Goebbels wanted Jews only to remind people of rats.

In a nutshell, Thieresenstadt was a way station to something much worse. The camp was a "sort and dispatch" facility. Women aged 18-40 and men 18-50 were considered able bodied and were employed as slave labor. Those falling outside of these boundaries were transported to be killed, except for healthy children. The children were brought up by other inmates, normally not their parents who were separated from families prior to their arrival. When children turned 18, if they had survived and were healthy enough to work, they joined the slave gangs.

Murdering of the inmates was carried out by shipments east to Auschwitz, Sobibor, or really anywhere in Poland. People were gathered into manifests of 1,000 and their names were tracked through to the recording of their execution.

But several thousand inmates died in Thieresenstadt, due to poor nutrition, non-existent sanitation facilities, leading in combination to epidemics of typhus, typhoid, and whooping cough.

Most amazingly, in 1990 someone opened a door while cleaning up an old building that had been part of the city during the War. Inside was a secret Synagogue. No one knows who built it, but it clearly was used by some of the inmates. On the wall is most of a prayer. It's content is "God, we will never forget you. Please don't forget us."

Prior to arriving at the camp, we passed a neighborhood on the outskirts of Prague where Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in early 1943. Heydrich, the architect of the Wannsee Conference (where the Final Solution was shaped), was appointed overseer of Czechoslovakia by Hitler. The Allies parachuted in two Czech partisans who observed Heydrich's movements, and then ambushed him while his open limousine slowed for a sharp turn onto the main highway.

Hitler was so upset that he ordered an entire nearby Czech town to be liquidated. All men were taken and shot the same day. The women were separated from their children, and sent off to prison camps. The children, numbering some 120 were all murdered, except for about 15 who had sufficiently "Aryan" features to qualify for adoption by German families.

Two pictures are worth noting. In the prison yard ( a fortress structure behind the Star of David that is pictured in the cemetery) you see a snack bar with blue signs advertising that food and drink can be found there. This is not the classiest place for a snack bar because it was the Gestapo snack and refreshment bar during the War. Prisoners who had worked all day in town had to pass this entrance on the way back to their cells, and smell the aromas of cooking food. Most of them were starving.

The second picture contains a typical meaningless Nazi/Gestapo phrase "Work will Make you Free". The only thing that made you free during the War was your death.