Since we were visiting
Prague, we knew that a visit to Terezín, as it is known in the Czech Republic, or
Theresienstadt, as I have always known it, had to be part of our trip. Terezín is about an hour's drive north of Prague, but its history reaches far beyond the town itself. During the Second World War, the Nazis turned the former fortress town built by the Habsburg monarchy, into a ghetto and transit camp for tens of thousands of Jews. They also used Terezín as a tool of Nazi propaganda and deception. In 1944, they carefully staged a visit by representatives of the International Red Cross, beautifying parts of the ghetto and creating a false impression that prisoners were living in good conditions. The nearby Small Fortress was used as a Gestapo prison. From Terezín, many prisoners were later deported to extermination and concentration camps further east.
We booked a semi-private tour with
Bat-El Tours, whose founder is Pavel Batel, an author, documentarist, and researcher specialising in Terezín. Our guide was Helge. He picked us up at our hotel and drove us to Terezín, starting the tour right away by giving us the essential history and background information needed to understand what happened at Terezín during the Holocaust.
Upon arrival, we were somewhat taken aback to discover that the town of Terezín is still inhabited today. We had expected to find a museum and not a place where people live and work. Despite this, some of the town's historic buildings have been turned into museums, and Helge explained that he and others are working to preserve more of them.
We began at the
Ghetto Museum, the former Boys' Barracks, where our guide showed us drawings made by children imprisoned in the ghetto. While some pieces show ordinary childhood subjects, memories of home and imagined worlds, others showed much darker images of ghetto life.
A short drive from there, we entered a tunnel leading to what is now an area of open grassland, and Helge explained how prisoners were forced to work there during the war, growing crops including potatoes. The produce was largely intended for the SS rather than for the prisoners themselves, making the agricultural work another cruel reminder of the conditions in which they were forced to live. What made the tunnel particularly poignant were the messages and drawings engraved into its sandstone walls by Jewish prisoners: names, dates, symbols and other personal traces left behind by people who had passed through Terezín.
One of the most unexpected places we visited was the Hidden Synagogue, a tiny prayer room secretly created by Jewish prisoners in a former storage room. It was decorated by the prisoners themselves, who used materials they were able to obtain through their work to paint symbols and Hebrew religious texts on the walls. The room was only rediscovered in the early 1990s, and the remarkable decoration has survived almost intact.
The prayer room was created by Artur Berlinger, a Jewish artist and religious teacher who arrived in Terezín with his wife, Bertha, in 1942. He conducted services there and created a space where prisoners could continue to practise their faith despite the terrible conditions around them. Artur and Bertha were both deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and murdered. Standing in this tiny room, surrounded by the words and symbols painted by people imprisoned in the ghetto, was incredibly moving.
We visited the Magdeburg Barracks, which served as the headquarters of the Jewish self-administration of the ghetto. There was a reconstruction of a typical prisoner dormitory, giving us some idea of the dreadful conditions in which people lived. But perhaps what struck me most was the evidence of the extraordinary cultural life that continued within the ghetto. The exhibitions displayed artwork, musical compositions and theatrical programmes, alongside a reconstruction of a theatre setting.
Amidst the suffering, prisoners created art, music and theatre, and organised educational programmes in an effort to maintain some sense of normality, identity and human dignity. The barracks, once occupied by Jewish artists, musicians, writers and educators, now preserve some of the work they created. These remnants of creativity are a testament to the determination of people who refused to let the circumstances around them completely extinguish their humanity. It was a place of both despair and defiance.
Passing the arrival and transport courtyards and the remains of the railway lines that brought Jewish prisoners to Terezín, and later carried many of them on to death camps, including Auschwitz, we came to the Jewish Cemetery and Crematorium. The cemetery contains both marked graves and mass burial sites, while the original crematorium ovens remain as a horrifying reminder of the sheer scale and brutality of the Nazi persecution. Standing there, it was almost impossible to comprehend what had happened in this place, the suffering, the deaths and the sheer number of people who passed through Terezín.
The tour then took us to the Small Fortress, a very different part of the site. While the main fortress town had become the Jewish Ghetto, the Small Fortress became a Gestapo prison during the Nazi occupation, a place of unimaginable cruelty where prisoners endured appalling conditions. Here we saw prisoner cells, isolation and punishment areas, showers and disinfection facilities, the execution courtyard and shooting range. It was difficult to comprehend the suffering that took place within these walls.
This is where we ended our tour. Leaving Terezín, I was filled with a deep sense of sadness, but also with a profound appreciation for the resilience of the people who were imprisoned there. Behind the buildings, exhibitions and physical remains lay overcrowding, hunger, disease and the constant fear of deportation to the death camps. Our visit was far more than an exploration of history. It was an experience that brought the human reality of Terezín painfully close, and reminded us of the importance of remembering and bearing witness to what happened there. It was, without doubt, one of the most powerful and memorable experiences of our entire trip to Prague.
