Visiting Prague

Summary: Form a nice ordinary city Trerezin turned into a horrible concentration camp named Terezinestadt by the Germans.

Trezine dates the 18th century when the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II founded this region as a military fort and garrison town naming the city after his mother the Empress Maria Theresa. The purpose of this construction, which took 10 years, was to hold soldiers during and not during war time, the fort could take 11000 soldiers.
For the period of the Austro-Prussian War in 1866 part of the fort was destroyed. During this century the fortress was used as a prison too. Throughout the I World War this place was used as prison-of-war especially for Russia supporters.
Although it was during the II World War, from 1941, that Terezin had become Teresinstadt, the concentration camp. The camp was ruled by the Gestapo and the SS generals named Siegfried Seidl, Anton Burger and Karl Rahm. At fist the city worked as a ghetto where Germans concentrated the Jews not only from Bohemia and Moravia but also form Germany Austria, Netherlands and Denmark, there were about 140.000. In the Ghetto the Jews were forced to wear the yellow David Star so they would be easily identified.  Most of ghettos, like Terezinestadt became a opportune way to concentrate the Jews in one location for later transport them to the concentration camps for extermination in Hitler’s final solution to the Jewish question, like Auschwitz. To Terezinestadt, were sent all Jews from old veterans of I World War, to woman, children, disabled people, fiscally or mentally. Men were separated form woman and people form different areas could not be together. Although the first Jews to arrive to Terezine were 300 men, this first transport, called the Aufbaukommando, they were sent with the purpose to construct more places where to place other Jews. Ten days later another 1000 arrived to Terezinstadt who were Jews from the self-government of the ghetto. The two transports we known as AK1 and AK2. In February of 1942 the people that lived in Terezin for centuries were forced to leave the town, they were about 3.500 people. The city had turned into prison only for Jews.
The high people from the Jewish community had a hard job in the camp. The Self-Government members had the task to inform the other Jews of the orders form Gestapo. The Ranni Benjamin Murmelstein and Rabbi Leo Baeck were both sent to Terezine but before that they were forced to make deportation lists, allocating work in the ghetto, distribution of food, providing housing, overseeing sanitation, and education. In the ghetto, as today it is possible to visit the result, at the Jewish Quarter in Prague, many activities were running, especially with children. Musicians, writers, orchestras, opera, theater troupe were organizing the action.
Terezinestadt was a great place to guards has it was seen as a SPA where they could take baths of mineral water. For that reason a pool was build inside of the concentration camp for the use of the guards and their families.
Many Jews were deported to Lublin, Treblinka, Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz form 1942 and 1944. Many other Jews were killed by the epidemics that affected almost half of the population of the ghetto. To hide this situation at the end of 1944 the Nazis let the Red Cross to rich the ghetto to show the world the Jews were not being mistreated, although many of them, mostly children were deported to Auschwitz before this event.
The Terezinestadt was not considered, in some sources, as an extermination camp although there was a wall for executions and in the year 1945 a gas chamber was built in Terezinestadt at the tail end of the war. The war ended before Hitler’s order, to kill all the left Jews in all the concentration camps, got to an end, therefore the prisoners left in the camp were saved.
Between November 1941 and April 1945, 140,000 Jews were deported to Terezin. 33,000 died there, 88,000 were deported to the extermination camps. When the war ended 19,000 were saved, or were transferred to neutral countries. Only 3,000 of those Jews deported to the extermination camps survived.
The camp is located at the north of Prague and it is possible to rent a car to visit this place in one day or by taking an organized excursion.

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