July 19: Terezin (pictures to come)

My first Terezin entry was deleted.
It was nearly a thousand words long...
But I shall lament no more.
Onward...

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The last, the very last,
so richly, brightly, dazzling yellow.
Perhaps if the sun's tears sing
against a white stone . . .

Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly `way up high.
It went away I'm sure because it
wished to kiss the world goodbye.

For seven weeks I've lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto,
but I have found my people here.
The dandelions call to me,
And the white chestnut candles in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don't live here in the ghetto.

Pavel Friedman (1921-1944), June 1942

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Going to Terezin, being exposed to museums, and learning more of the realities of the Holocaust is heart breaking. In classes throughout my life, we have learned the numbers, the dates, the places...we grasp at comprehending its magnitude. We grapple at how it could even be possible, how it is possible that genocide even happens today. Our hearts ache, feel guilty, get mad, get sad, turn numb--and start to break. And that is what genocide is. Breaking. It is about breaking bodies. It is about breaking their spirits. It is about breaking a people.

Terezin is an interesting place. Once a military town, its fortified walls and neat little packaging made it attractive to the Gestapo to help solve the "Jewish problem." But it played a very unique role. It wasn't really camp. It wasn't a typical ghetto. There were no gas chambers and limited outright killings. Its purpose was to be a model camp. A small little town for Jewish people to live together under the control of the Nazis--a perfectly passable place to the foreign eye. But model didn't mean liveable conditions. It created a very unique place where, in the midst of tragedy, a culture flickered. This paradoxical situation was a product of deception.

In the early years, Terezin was a ghetto to which all of the Jews in the German protectorates of Bohemia and Moravia were shipped via train. In this model camp, they were given a bit of leniency. They were allowed to form a small government-like organization to help organize the town to some extent. The collective feeling was to work as hard as possible, cause little problems, keep the town as clean as possible to impress the Nazis to allow them to stay. Because of good behavior and the Gestapo's intention to impress outsiders with the little Jewish colony--they allowed some organized forms of cultural expression.

Jewish composers and musicians collaborated to create beautiful concerts with original scores. Former Jewish directors and actors wrote and performed elaborate plays. Children were also gathered to be in their own plays. This creation made people's stomachs seem not as empty, the streets not so dirty, the world not so dark.

Although these forms of expression were also abused. Former artists became propaganda artists--but at least they were working. One director was promised protection in exchange for the creation of a propaganda window for the outside world to see. We watched his piece, making the town seem like a harmonious Jewish community full of people who worked hard, ate well, and enjoyed life made me want to vomit. The charade was absurd, and helped prolong the outsider's thoughts that it couldn't be so bad.

However, the allowance for culture set apart Terezin. What people are most familar with now is the role of expression amongst Terezin's many, ill-fated children. Many dedicated teachers risked punishment in the camps providing the children with tools to express themselves through art and writing. In the early years, Terezin's children created paintings of their dreams and of their realities. We saw a few of young drawings when we were exploring the Jewish museums in Prague, but here we got to see so much more. Poems and paintings flourished in the early days when paper was much more available and rules not so harsh. Several boys and girls units created homemade newspapers and magazines. I put two poems in this entry. After I catch my breath from reading them, what I notice most are the dates.

This nearly passable ghetto couldn't last forever....

In came the people. With more people came more rules, more deaths, more crowding, more deaths, more disease, more deaths, more suffering, more deaths...less space, less time, less energy, less food, less culture. Terezin was teeming with people, and more arriving everyday from all over Europe. People were crammed into every spare space, and the living space reduced to a cramped one square meter per person. Not even enough to stand. There was no time for expression, and rules banished it now anyway. People were told they could only write 50 words a month. Pregnancy was not allowed, and those who were either were forced to have an abortion or the baby was killed upon birth. People were sleeping in their own feces. The elderly were given nearly nothing to eat. The dead lay amoung the living for days, perishing from stress, starvation, disease.

Leaving the ghettos in truckloads, the fate of bodies was an example of one way the Jewish culture was broken. Death and burial ceremonies are very specific in the Jewish faith. Rituals and requirements for the body have great cultural and historical significance. But with the flux of mortality in the Ghetto, bodies could no longer be buried intact. A crematorium was built. And it was staffed with the Jewish people. In strict contridiction with the Jewish traditions, the Jews cremated their dead and placed their ashes in paper urns. Comforted by the fact they would be buried, at the end of the war, Germans threw the ashes in to the water and hid them the town.

Though the death tolls mounted, there was still not enough room in Terezin. It turned from a ghetto, to just another stop on the way to Auschwitz. Whereas a person had a fairly significant chance of survival in the original Terezin, when deported...their chances fell to less than 25%. Every day, people lived with the fear of being handed a deportation slip. Out of the 88,000 people who were sent to Auschwitz...17,000 survived.

A glimpse into Terezin from 65 years away. Abandoned after the war, Terezin slowly became occupied with citizens living in the same streets of the ghetto. You can still see the faded street signs from the ghetto, stand amongst the same buildings, and see the cemetaries and memorials--but other than that and the museum...it is trying to maintain a quiet existence. What would it be like to live in a place where thousands upon thousands died, and even more were on their way to death? They can't just bulldoze it over. They can't paralyze it into a permanent ghetto. But how can you live like that. In some way, they have to move on. There are discussions of making a university nearby and creating a university town....but it is endlessly controversial. On one hand, we can't just make every place where something treachorous happens into a museum. Hell...what happened to the settlements of all of the Native Americans we murdered? It is a complicated issue. I am not sure how I feel about it.

All I know, is that Terezin and the Holocaust should never be forgotten.

Lest it happen again.

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Our relationship to the Holocaust in the US is so much different then it is in central Europe. In Europe, there are actual places to see and it is more likely to have intimate connections with those who were directly impacted by the Holocaust. In central Europe, there were citizens on the outside that deal with the pain of not stopping it. People who had to participate in some indirect way or another. It is true, that some of these people have spilled over to the United States...but the countries that were in the heart of it all are here. It is a matter of perspective. I would like to speak with somebody who grew up in a town near Terezin or who had to witnessed their towns becoming smaller, as the Jewish people disappeared into the night.
I wonder...


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A little garden,
Fragant and full of roses.
The path is narrow
and a little boy walks along it.

A little boy, a sweet boy,
Like that growing blossom.
When the blossom comes to bloom.
The little boy will be no more.
--Franta Bass (1930-1944)