Day 21

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Today was our visit to Terezin. All ten of us from Mizzou went.

For a little background, Terezin was a Gestapo Police Prison during World War II under the Nazis. Most inmates included people resisting the Nazi regime. This prison served as mostly a stop-over, as most prisoners were later sent to Nazi courts, other prisons, or concentration camps. While the Jews were not the only group of people here, they were treated the harshest.

Terezin served as the "model Jewish town," a place that the Nazis would show off to international groups as propaganda. It was very hard to believe that a place that killed over 10,000 people was one of the "good" concentration camps.

We took a bus to Terezin, and the bus station was a little bit of an adventure. We wanted to get on the 10:00 bus, but we missed it. We settled for the 11:00 bus instead. The ride to Terezin was pretty much farmland (more sunflower fields) with the occasional small town.

As we arrived to Terezin, we saw the huge walls of the fortress. Terezin was originally a fortified city, (ironically, built to keep the Germans out in the 1780's) but the Nazis forced out the 7,000 people living there to create their prison.

The bus station was a small walk from Terezin. The first thing we saw walking there was the National Cemetary, which had about 10,000 graves of the people who died at Terezin. The cemetary stretched on, rows upon rows of gravestones, some marked, some not, and red flowers between each stone. It was hard to believe that so many were killed in this one place, and even harder to believe that so many more were killed in other places.

Upon entering Terezin, we saw the administrative buildings and then the cells in yard one. These cells were small and had a series of "beds" against the wall. The beds were really just three tiers of long wooden boards, nothing to separate where one person slept..

After the administrative buildings and the first cells, we walked about 500m through the walls of the castle. This cooridor was not used by the Nazis, but rather before their arrival when the fortress was used as a prison.

The cooridor led us to the execution ground. Just past the execution ground were the mass graves. 601 bodies were exhumed and reburied in the National Cemetary in 1945.

Next we went to the fourth yard, an area built in 1944 to house over 3000 inmates. The cells in this yard were even worse, between 400-600 people were in each cell. The beds were like the ones in the smaller cells, but they had four tiers instead of three. One of the cells was converted into an exhibit with art inspired by the concentration camp. It contained words of people in the camp as well as people running it, as well as grotesque pictures and human hair. It's really amazing that something so awful could have happened in the past century. Another cell contained an exhibit about Terezin when it was used as a German Internment camp after World War II. Germans (although many of these people were Czechoslovak nationals of German descent) were kept there between 1945 and 1948 until they were resettled outside of Czechoslovakia.

The tour was basically finished after that. There were more yard for women and for working. Our ticket had also allowed us to go to a Museum in town, but we were not able to go because the last bus left at 3:00. We waited (in the rain) for the bus, not completely sure if it would come (the people at the bus station were completely unhelpful and would not sell us round trip tickets or tell us when the buses left from Terezin) but we finally found a bus and went back to Prague.

By the way, we took tons more pictures. We also have pictures from last night. Here's the link, again:

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Photos

The National Cemetary
Over 10,000 people buried

Cells
Cells housing 60-90 people in the first yard

The Fourth Yard
Built in 1944, where the mass cells were

Mass Cells
Housing 400-600 people each