Thursday, April 12, 2012
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.
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