All quiet on the Eastern front.

Yesterday I visited Terezín together with Jetske, a girl I know from Amsterdam, and her friend Gaspar. Terezín is a small fortress town, 50 km north of Prague. It was built in 1780, when Prague was part of the Austrian-Hungarian empire (then referred to as ‘Theresienstadt’) and used in the battle against the invading Prussians.
Already during the First World War was the ‘small fort’ of Terezín used as a prison. When the Nazi’s occupied the town in 1940 (and started calling it ‘Theresienstadt’ again) they built a concentration/transit camp for Jews and political prisoners, and used the small fort as a prison again. Most of the 140.000 people that passed through Terezín were eventually send to Auschwitz.
In 1943, 500 Jews from Denmark were send to the camp in Terezín, after which the Red Cross demanded to visit the camp in order to make sure they were safe there. The Nazi’s came up with a clever plan to trick the Red Cross representatives by building a temporary ‘model camp’. First, a lot of people where quickly shipped off to Auschwitz to hide the fact that the camp was overpopulated. Then, fake shops and bars were opened, and the prisoners were given regular clothing to wear. The whole camp was supposed to look like a nice and peaceful 'temporary home'. The Red Cross visited the camp and saw seemingly content people in spacious rooms, concluding that the transit camp was ‘acceptable and safe’. The Nazi’s, content with their successful scam, decided to make a short film about Theresienstadt (entitled Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet with the addition Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt – ‘the Führer gives a city to the Jews’), to pretend they weren’t as brutal as everyone thought. The actors and crew were all prisoners: forced to cooperate, and killed or transported immediately after the project was finished. The film itself was not widely distributed through the Red Cross, as it was intended, but found in the camp after the liberation in May 1945.

The weather was beautiful yesterday, with a fierce sun and a clear blue sky. When we arrived at the small fortress, there were hardly any visitors. We received a detailed map upon entrance and walked across the whole fortress, entering all the rooms and prison cells, and walking through the 500 m long (!) tunnel that was small enough to make you claustrophobic for the rest of your life.
It was very weird to visit a place with such a horrible past. You know that every room you enter was once filled with people who lived under terrible conditions and were uncertain of their lives, their future. The rooms and prisons were scarcely furnished with what I assume were the original beds and tables, and every space had a sinister atmosphere. And yet, every single room that had a window was occupied by swallows: up high, against the ceilings, were nests filled with little birds screaming for food. Countless swallows flied in and out of the rooms and across the territory.

After three hours of walking and visiting the detailed exhibitions that are scattered around the area, providing a lot of information on the camp, we were desperate for some food and drinks. We left the fortress and headed into the deserted town, and after dinner we waited for hours for a bus that didn’t come and eventually hitchhiked back to Prague.

I am still impressed by the visit, as I was the first time in 1995. I’ve always been extremely interested in World War II, mainly because of the stories my Dutch grandparents, who witnessed it from up close, told me when I was a kid. To walk around in a place that was once used as a concentration camp is fascinating and repulsive at the same time, and it made me wonder if it was in fact the right thing to do. Is it important to make a place like that public, to allow people to walk in, take pictures, touch the doors and beds and tables? Or is it disgusting? Should a place like that be preserved, like it is now, or destroyed? I stood in a huge, empty shower room, used more than sixty years ago to ‘delouse’ people that would be dead in less than five years; watching birds feed their young while other ‘catastrophe-tourists’ came in to take pictures…and I was completely confused.
At the end of the visit we watched a short documentary that contained excerpts of the propaganda-movie about Terezín. You saw a football match between two groups of prisoners, and scenes of ‘happy, healthy’ women talking, sitting on the same beds we had just seen. Different voice-overs, in different languages, kept repeating that “everything is fine in Theresienstadt, I’m not lacking anything at all.”