Terezin: Fortress Turned Concentration Camp

This was the first concentration camp that I visited on my tour of Eastern Europe. It was not my first concentration camp--that was Dachau, near Munich. It was my first brush with how the Germans globally operated during WWII, and it struck a chord of what evil lurks in the heart of man, even in the modern era. It started off as a fortress, built for troops. In the late 18th century the Habsburg Monarchy erected the fortress, as well as a large walled town directly across the Ohře River, near its confluence with the Elbe River, and named it after Empress Maria Theresa (a poor legacy for her, as it turned out). Construction started in 1780 and lasted ten years. The total area of the fortress was 3.89 km². The fortification was designed in the tradition of Sébastian le Prestre de Vauban. In peacetime it held 5,655 soldiers, and in wartime around 11,000 soldiers could be placed here. During the second half of the 19th century, the fortress was also used as a prison.

The Germans were not unique in their ideas about how to use Terezin. During World War I, the fortress was used as a political prison camp. Many thousand supporters of Russia (Russophiles from Galicia and Bukovina) were placed by Austro-Hungarian authorities in the fortress. Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and his wife, died there of tuberculosis in 1918. During WWII, the Gestapo concentrated Jews from Czechoslovakia, as well as many from Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Denmark. More than 150,000 Jews were sent there (remember, a place designed to house many fewer), and although it was not an extermination camp (at first) about 33,000 died in the ghetto itself, mostly because of the appalling conditions arising out of extreme population density--disease and malnutrition abounded. About 88,000 inhabitants were deported from Terezin to Auschwitz and other death camps. At the end of the war there were 17,247 survivors. Today, the military barracks are a place to see what Nazis did, but the town is trying to regain footing as a city. Such a difficult legasy. People were ejected from their homes by Germans, and now they are trying to overcome poverty, isolation and their ignomious past. Such a very sad place to visit.