Terezín: inconceivable suffering, death and gift shops

Lisa Bonarrigo
1. 6. 2009 9:45
Student visits Terezin concentration camp and finds it hard to imagine past horrors
Bunk beds in the Small Fortress show the horrid living conditions many endured there
Bunk beds in the Small Fortress show the horrid living conditions many endured there | Foto: Lisa Bonarrigo

Prague - Toman Brod's fingers are wrapped tightly around the papers containing what he's prepared to say to a room full of American students. When he speaks, he looks above our heads to the back of the room, making no eye contact. He's 80 years old. Knowing that he's a survivor of the Holocaust, I expect him to look weak. But he exudes confidence, standing the entire 45 minutes he speaks in his tailored gray suit and tie.

"In March 1939, the Czechoslovak Republic was occupied by Nazi Germany," he told us. "This was the beginning of our suffering. They issued many new laws to restrict the lives of Jewish citizens and particularly to humiliate them. Jews lost jobs, were not allowed to visit restaurants and movie houses or café houses…and they were no longer permitted to own radio sets…Our time for shopping was restricted, and there was a curfew after 8 p.m. And finally, the most humiliating act to me, was that we were ordered to wear a big yellow six-pointed star on the left side of our coats. We were no longer considered members of the Czech society. We became officially and unmistakably second-class citizens and human beings."

"Family Camp" for Jews

Outside of this modern classroom in which Toman speaks sits the town of Terezin, where he was a 13-year-old prisoner in what used to be a Jewish ghetto and Nazi transport camp 67 years ago. Terezin was used by the Gestapo as propaganda, portrayed in a film for the International Red Cross as a "Family Camp" with optimal living conditions. The reality was that Terezin was a concentration camp for Jews on their way to death, and a place of torture and starvation for political prisoners.

Terezín
Terezín | Foto: Czechtourism

When we first got off the bus, an hour outside of Prague, I was unaware we'd arrived at a former warehouse for death. I'd read about the Holocaust in books like Elie Wiesel's Night and The Pink Triangle by Richard Plant. For some reason, in Terezin I expected to see what is depicted so vividly in those books: the genocide carried out by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany during World War II, persecuting and murdering six million European Jews and another four million political prisoners, homosexuals, and disabled civilians, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

No sign of torture

But I didn't see Jews tormented, shoved into lines where they would remain walking or running for 40 miles to their death. I didn't see Nazis, expressionless, publicly executing victims who, because of their disability or age, simply couldn't withstand forced slave labor.

Instead I saw souvenir shops, restaurants, and a playground. A girl in a bright pink jacket was walking through the central courtyard with a companion, talking and laughing. This feeling of normalcy diminished when I saw a sign outside of the museum directing visitors to the "Krematorium."

Toman told us that although we may not see the suffering he and the other prisoners endured, we must try to imagine what it was like.

It was overcrowded, food was scarce, and the unhygienic conditions led to the rapid spread of typhus. Prisoners were forced into slave labor, and more than 250 were executed in the Small Fortress. Terezin was not an extermination camp, but the conditions there were comparable to one. As a result of this, 35,000 people died within the less than four years the Germans controlled it.

Just a stop from death

For 87,000 of the 140,000 prisoners who passed through the Main and Small Fortresses, Terezin was just a stop before they were sent to the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps in Poland. "The main anxiety, the main fear, was the expectation of the unknown…As we later learned, this fear was fully justified," Toman said.

He was one of those transported to the labor camp of Auschwitz, and then to the Birkenau extermination camp two miles away. "With few of our belongings and a piece of bread, this trip lasted maybe two days and two nights," Toman recalled. "It was an indescribable experience, so terrible; among us were corpses, and we were nearly suffocated, very dirty and above all, terribly thirsty. After some time, finally, the train stopped. It was a freezing night…Accompanied by yelling and weeping we were loaded in trucks and brought to Birkenau…Before my departure from Terezin I was told by an experienced old prisoner, 'If you come to the place in which you see the huge barbed wire fences, you have landed in the concentration camp.' It was worse, it was an extermination camp."

A visitor walks in front of wooden bed at the opening of the exhibition 'The Girls from Room 28' in a parliamentary administration building in Berlin January 23, 2008. 'The Girls from Room 28' exhibition shows the life of the twelve to fourteen year-old girls housed in Room 28, Building L410, in the concentration camp Theresienstadt during the years 1942-1944. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch (GERMANY)
A visitor walks in front of wooden bed at the opening of the exhibition 'The Girls from Room 28' in a parliamentary administration building in Berlin January 23, 2008. 'The Girls from Room 28' exhibition shows the life of the twelve to fourteen year-old girls housed in Room 28, Building L410, in the concentration camp Theresienstadt during the years 1942-1944. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch (GERMANY) | Foto: Reuters

Some of those in Toman's transport were sent to other camps, including Toman himself, who said a doctor arbitrarily saved his life with a simple wave of his hand, selecting him and 90 other boys to be sent out of Birkenau.

Toman's brother was sent to a different camp, but did not survive there. The people in rest of his transport who remained were killed after a few days.

"If you count all the boys who were younger than 16, and who were sent from their homes and then from Terezin to the concentration and extermination camps in Poland, perhaps you could count on fingers, or a few hands, how many of them survived," Toman said.

His mother remained in Terezin where she died, and his father died the same day the Munich Agreement was signed in September 1938, enabling Germany to take control of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. Toman said in hindsight his father's fate was probably for the best, as his poor health would have caused him much more suffering when Germany occupied the Czechoslovak Republic in March 1939.

I speculated that the confidence I saw in Toman is a result of what he's been through. He seems grateful for his life, and reiterated that although there was much suffering and dying at Terezin, "it was not the worst" at the time. The act of sharing the reality of his experience is what he described as "professional now," as he has become a historian of the Holocaust. He also calls the lectures his duty, noting that he is one of the very few survivors around to tell his story, the story of so many now forgotten.

Despite the books I'd read and the history lessons I'd been taught, I could never fully stomach the fact that millions of people were tortured and killed, entire races of people exterminated in various camps throughout Europe. It doesn't seem real to me, and because I know I will never experience it, it is unimaginable.

Confused about his confidence

And yet with a survivor standing before me, listening to him describe losing his family as a young teenager, I still couldn't comprehend it. At 13, I was concerned about boys and what my next outfit would be for school. Standing before me was someone who lost everything he had at that age. I felt badly, guilty even, knowing what he went through, but not being able to fully empathize because I'd never experienced it.

Vchod do památníku Terezín
Vchod do památníku Terezín | Foto: tr

My confusion didn't subside as I entered the memorial at Terezin, where hundreds of pieces of artwork created by prisoners have been preserved. In addition to artists who drew and painted, Terezin contained Jewish writers and professors who spoke, musicians who performed, actors who put on theatrical shows, and even children who wrote poetry. I wondered how such a cultural life could exist in a setting where most people wouldn't survive what awaited them.

I stopped to look at a black and white drawing. Two hands and forearms are stretched upward, reaching out of a pool of water. The lower half of the figure's head is submerged. This person is alone. There are fragments of something floating around the body, maybe pieces of paper or glass, or just scattered belongings.

Source of light

Looking at this drawing, I began to realize that no matter how I try to interpret it, I will never know what this artist was feeling. I've never had the fear of death consume my everyday thoughts. I've never been unwillingly ripped from the comfort of my home, my family, and my friends. I've never been gasping for breath in a dark train car maybe minutes away from death.

A short while later, I was inside the Small Fortress, the part of the war era Terezin that has been preserved. It was the largest prison in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia at the time. Standing in a 10 by 10 ft. chamber with about 25 people, it felt cramped. There was a tiny hole in the wall, probably the size of a home telephone, and a small window near the ceiling. These were the only two sources of light and fresh air entering the room when the door was closed. I was trying to understand how 50 to 60 prisoners could even fit in this space. I pictured the merciless guards, snickering to each other as they closed off the hole in the wall for fun to see how long the prisoners could last without suffocating to death.

I was standing in a room where hundreds of people probably died, wearing my Via Spiga down jacket and my Ugg boots and feeling so out of place. I had no immediate connection to any of it, which must have been the source of my overwhelming discomfort.

After we saw the showers that were used only on Saturdays, the barracks where prisoners slept with their bodies overlapping on hard wood, and the isolation chambers which were pitch black even though it was only the afternoon, we exited the Small Fortress and were immediately greeted by fast-moving cars and a hot dog stand. We got on the bus and drove away from the enclosed town that holds what remains of the suffering I will never know.

This story was originally published by the Prague Wanderer, a web-zine run by New York University students in Prague, Czech Republic.

Lisa Bonarrigo is a third-year student at New York University studying journalism and sociology. She is from New Canaan, Connecticut.

 

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