A Side Trip to Terezin
Prague, Czech Republic
I'm always a little nervous before a trip. "Will the hotel be ok?" (When we were young and brave, we used to arrive in a city then ask the tourism office to arrange a room. Sometimes the results were disasterous - toilets two flights up, showers two flights down and hot water from 6:00 - 6:30 a.m. but sometimes they were delightful.) "Will we find our way around? Will we be able to make ourselves understood? What if we get sick and need a doctor?" Usually, I settle in and feel comfortable after the first day. So it has been with Prague.
The hotel, which we arranged on the web, was frightening at first glance. It shares an entry with a dance club/bar located in the basement. The hotel is behind a peeling door and up a very long flight of dirty, smelly stone stairs. (Lately, the smell seems to be gone.) I broke my wonderful little suitcase struggling with it up the stairs. Our room for the first few nights was right above the entrance. We've been moved to a quieter location. It's on the top (4th) floor - no elevator! But, it's quiet. European hotels tend to have smaller rooms with no dressers and few shelves. But, our room is quiet! And the hotel is actually in a terrific location, right in between the old town square and Wenceslas (as in the Christmas Carol - "Good King Wenceslas went out on the feast of Stephen...") Square - one of the commercial centers of Prague.
Many people who deal with tourists (hotel clerks, waiters and prsonnel in tourism centers) speak a little English. Most people don't but we have made ourselves understood, sometimes by pantomiming, sometimes pointing - like to my socks in the department store to indicate I needed to buy another pair.
For three weeks preceding our trip, Prague was in the 70s. When we arrived, a cold wave hit, 50 degrees and rainy. Naturally, I am sick again. Making myself understood at the pharmacy was more of a challenge than the socks but we did it.
Yesterday, we went to Terezin. Our tour guide (obviously not Jewish) referred to it as a prison or a transfer camp. We would have used the words "concentration camp." The prison portion of it was build in the 1700s and has been used to jail political prisons since then. When the Nazis invaded this area, the fortress became a gestapo prison housing citizens of the Soviet Union, Poles, Germans and Yugoslavs. But is soon became part of Hitler's "final solution" against the Jews.
Eventually, the Nazis took over the whole town of Terezin, emptied out its residents and put up a wall around it. They filled the town with Jews on their way to the death camps. It was used especially to house the elderly and children. Nearly 1/5 of all the Jews imprisoned in Terezin died there. From the beginning of the war through 1945, some 140,000 people were housed in Terezin. 87,000 were transported out to camps such as Auschwitz. Less than 4,000 of those survived.
We saw barracks where the Jews were living by the hundreds per room, sleeping side by side on wooden bunks, constructed three high, with one small "pot" per room (not a toilet, just a pot). Apparently, they were fed a scrap of bread per day and a bowl of watery potato soup.
It was a cold, windy day when we visited - very overcast - a perfect accompaniment to the place. We saw the shower room where 100 people at a time showered in one big open room with ten shower heads in the ceiling. Next door was the room where their clothing was washed (to kill bed bugs) and given to them wet in which to re-dress.
In spite of the conditions, the Jews established schools for the children and music lessons, wrote operas and plays and staged them and produced incredible works of art. It was heart-rending to see the surviving drawings or works of music then read about the artists. Their biographies usually ended, "In 1944, he (or she) was transported to such & such death camp where he was gassed.
We saw the crematorium where the bodies were burned. In the beginning, the Nazis performed autopsies and kept records. After a while, record keeping became impossible so the dead Jews were just burned by the hundreds and buried in cardboard boxes.
At Terezin, they died of starvation and disease. Even as the war was ending, a wave of typhoid fever spread through the camp, making it impossible to release and repatraite the remaining Jews.
As we walked around Terezin with a tour guide, two young guys in the group kep making jokes. Mel finally said to the most obnoxious one, "Please don't make jokes about this. I lost all of of my father's family to the Nazi's. You should not make jokes about this."
You can read about it and hear the stories but the magnitude and horror of it is really brought home by seeing a place like Terezin.
Love,
Janet
I'm always a little nervous before a trip. "Will the hotel be ok?" (When we were young and brave, we used to arrive in a city then ask the tourism office to arrange a room. Sometimes the results were disasterous - toilets two flights up, showers two flights down and hot water from 6:00 - 6:30 a.m. but sometimes they were delightful.) "Will we find our way around? Will we be able to make ourselves understood? What if we get sick and need a doctor?" Usually, I settle in and feel comfortable after the first day. So it has been with Prague.
The hotel, which we arranged on the web, was frightening at first glance. It shares an entry with a dance club/bar located in the basement. The hotel is behind a peeling door and up a very long flight of dirty, smelly stone stairs. (Lately, the smell seems to be gone.) I broke my wonderful little suitcase struggling with it up the stairs. Our room for the first few nights was right above the entrance. We've been moved to a quieter location. It's on the top (4th) floor - no elevator! But, it's quiet. European hotels tend to have smaller rooms with no dressers and few shelves. But, our room is quiet! And the hotel is actually in a terrific location, right in between the old town square and Wenceslas (as in the Christmas Carol - "Good King Wenceslas went out on the feast of Stephen...") Square - one of the commercial centers of Prague.
Many people who deal with tourists (hotel clerks, waiters and prsonnel in tourism centers) speak a little English. Most people don't but we have made ourselves understood, sometimes by pantomiming, sometimes pointing - like to my socks in the department store to indicate I needed to buy another pair.
For three weeks preceding our trip, Prague was in the 70s. When we arrived, a cold wave hit, 50 degrees and rainy. Naturally, I am sick again. Making myself understood at the pharmacy was more of a challenge than the socks but we did it.
Yesterday, we went to Terezin. Our tour guide (obviously not Jewish) referred to it as a prison or a transfer camp. We would have used the words "concentration camp." The prison portion of it was build in the 1700s and has been used to jail political prisons since then. When the Nazis invaded this area, the fortress became a gestapo prison housing citizens of the Soviet Union, Poles, Germans and Yugoslavs. But is soon became part of Hitler's "final solution" against the Jews.
Eventually, the Nazis took over the whole town of Terezin, emptied out its residents and put up a wall around it. They filled the town with Jews on their way to the death camps. It was used especially to house the elderly and children. Nearly 1/5 of all the Jews imprisoned in Terezin died there. From the beginning of the war through 1945, some 140,000 people were housed in Terezin. 87,000 were transported out to camps such as Auschwitz. Less than 4,000 of those survived.
We saw barracks where the Jews were living by the hundreds per room, sleeping side by side on wooden bunks, constructed three high, with one small "pot" per room (not a toilet, just a pot). Apparently, they were fed a scrap of bread per day and a bowl of watery potato soup.
It was a cold, windy day when we visited - very overcast - a perfect accompaniment to the place. We saw the shower room where 100 people at a time showered in one big open room with ten shower heads in the ceiling. Next door was the room where their clothing was washed (to kill bed bugs) and given to them wet in which to re-dress.
In spite of the conditions, the Jews established schools for the children and music lessons, wrote operas and plays and staged them and produced incredible works of art. It was heart-rending to see the surviving drawings or works of music then read about the artists. Their biographies usually ended, "In 1944, he (or she) was transported to such & such death camp where he was gassed.
We saw the crematorium where the bodies were burned. In the beginning, the Nazis performed autopsies and kept records. After a while, record keeping became impossible so the dead Jews were just burned by the hundreds and buried in cardboard boxes.
At Terezin, they died of starvation and disease. Even as the war was ending, a wave of typhoid fever spread through the camp, making it impossible to release and repatraite the remaining Jews.
As we walked around Terezin with a tour guide, two young guys in the group kep making jokes. Mel finally said to the most obnoxious one, "Please don't make jokes about this. I lost all of of my father's family to the Nazi's. You should not make jokes about this."
You can read about it and hear the stories but the magnitude and horror of it is really brought home by seeing a place like Terezin.
Love,
Janet
posted by Mel and Janet Muchnik | 5:49 AM
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