Terezín was established from 1780 to 1790 as a fortress town by Emperor Joseph II, who named it after his mother, Empress Maria Theresa. It was built to keep the Prussians out of harm’s way, but no battle was ever fought there.
By 1940 Germany assigned the Gestapo to adapt Terezín, better known by the German name Theresienstadt, as a ghetto and concentration camp.
Terezín fortress
by pamatnik-terezine.com
More than 15.000 children lived in the ghetto before being deported East. Only 245 survived.
The 7,000 Czechs that lived in the town before the Nazis took over were expelled during June of 1942, making way for some 50,000 Jews. Some 155,000 Jews were brought there during the war. Approximately 87,000 were deported to concentration camps farther East, to Treblinka and Auschwitz, while about 34,000 died in the ghetto.
Famous sketch picture of Gestapo
They died mostly due to the appalling conditions arising out of extreme population density, malnutrition and disease. About 88,000 inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. As late as the end of 1944, the Germans were deporting Jews to the death camps. At the end of the war, there were 17.247 survivors of Theresienstadt
After D-Day and the Invasion of Normandy Nazis permitted representatives from the Danish Red Cross and the International Red Cross to visit Theresienstadt in order to dispel rumors about the extermination camps. Weeks of preparation preceded the visit. The area was cleaned up, and the Nazis deported many Jews to Auschwitz to minimize the appearance of overcrowding. Nazis directed the building of fake shops and caffés to imply that the Jews lived in relative comfort. The Red Cross delegates were fooled and approved of the ghetto, not realizing it was a concentration camp.
Cultural activities gave prisoners a sense of self-worth and escape from the terrible conditions of their everyday lives and allowed them to rebel spiritually.
Memorial shaped like a large menorah
The cemetery was used in the beginning to bury the dead. There are markers scattered on the green grass, but there are no names or dates only a single engraved Star of David.
Crematorium
At top capacity the crematorium could cremate 190 bodies a day. The ashes were taken out of the back, searched for gold and then placed in cardboard boxes.
Read about Small fortress concentration camp nearby
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