Prague - A visit to the infamous Terezin Concentration Camp.

Terezín, or Theresienstadt, originally served as an army garrison town. It was built at the end of the 18th century by Emperor Joseph II as an ingenious system of military fortresses. In the 20th century, during World War II, the Nazis converted Terezín into a concentration camp and Jewish ghetto.

It wasn’t a mass extermination camp like Auschwitz – Birkenau in Poland, but a holding centre for Jews and other Holocaust victims before they could be sent onward to their deaths. Conditions were atrocious and many thousands perished from hunger and disease in this dark period in European history. 

The main ghetto museum ( see my separate blog ) is spread out over several buildings, and the permanent exhibitions explore both the daily lives of the prisoners of the Terezín ghetto and the way the Nazis used Terezín as a showcase camp to deceive the International Red Cross that their intentions with respect to Jewish prisoners were benign. 

Terezín is 60km north of Prague and the drive takes just over an hour. Buses from Prague to the town of Litoměřice normally stop at Terezín, departing from near the Praha-Holešovice metro station on line C.

We left Prague at 12.30 pm, arrived at the Camp by 1.50pm. We were in the Camp from 2.00 – 4.00 pm and then proceeded to the Museum nearby.

While it was mainly used to hold Jews from Czechoslovakia, tens of thousands of people were also deported to Terezín from Germany and Austria, and several hundred from the Netherlands and Denmark. This included 15,000 children. (Many of these unfortunate people were subsequently transported on to Treblinka and Auschwitz by rail.)

Today, the whole site is known as the Terezín Memorial because much of it has been eerily preserved in its 1940s state.

On our tour of the Terezín Memorial monuments, the guide outlines the complicated history of events that unfolded at here. They also explain how Terezín differs both psychologically and physically from any of the 632 other camps established by the Nazis.

The Terezín Memorial is divided into two parts:

The Small Fortress (also known as the Prague Gestapo Prison) was the concentration camp. Around 90,000, mostly political prisoners passed through here, and we walk through the complex to see where they were housed.

The Big Fortress, comprising 80% of the Terezín Memorial, was the Jewish ghetto. See my separate blog on the museum.

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