A massive bulwark of stone and earth, the fortress of Terezín (Theresienstadt in German) was built in 1780 by Emperor Joseph II with a single purpose in mind: to keep the enemy out. Ironically, it is more notorious for keeping people in – it served as a political prison in the later days of the Habsburg empire. Gavrilo Princip, the assassin who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, was incarcerated here during WWI, and when the Germans took control during WWII the fortress became a grim holding pen for Jews bound for the extermination camps. In contrast to the colourful, baroque face of many Czech towns, Terezín is a stark but profoundly evocative monument to a darker aspect of Europe’s past.
The bleakest phase of Terezín’s history began in 1940 when the Gestapo established a prison in the Lesser Fortress. Evicting the inhabitants from the Main Fortress the following year, the Nazis transformed the town into a transit camp through which some 150,000 people eventually passed en route to the death camps. For most, conditions were appalling. Between April and September 1942 the ghetto’s population increased from 12,968 to 58,491, leaving each prisoner with only 1.65 sq m of space and causing disease and starvation on a terrifying scale. In the same period, there was a 15-fold increase in the number of deaths within the prison walls.
Terezín later became the centrepiece of one of the Nazis’ more extraordinary coups of public relations. Official visitors to the fortress, including representatives of the Red Cross, saw a town that was billed as a kind of Jewish ‘refuge’, with a Jewish administration, banks, shops, cafes, schools and a thriving cultural life – it even had a jazz band – in a charade that twice completely fooled international observers. In reality Terezín was home to a relentlessly increasing population of prisoners, regular trains departing for the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and the death by starvation, disease or suicide of some 35,000 people.
From the ground, the sheer scale of the maze of walls and moats that surrounds the Main Fortress (Hlavní pevnost) is impossible to fathom – mainly because the town is actually inside it. In fact, when you first arrive by bus or car you may be left thinking that the central square looks no different from a hundred other old town centres. Take a peek at the aerial photograph in the Ghetto Museum, or wander past the walls en route to the Lesser Fortress, however, and a very different picture emerges. At the heart of the Main Fortress is the neat grid of streets that makes up the town of Terezín. There’s little to look at except the chunky, 19th-century Church of the Resurrection , the arcaded former Commandant’s office , the neoclassical administrative buildings on the square and the surrounding grid of houses with their awful secrets. South of the square are the anonymous remains of a railway siding , built by prisoners, via which loads of further prisoners arrived – and departed.
The main sight here is the absorbing Ghetto Museum , which has two branches. The main branch explores the rise of Nazism and life in the Terezín ghetto, using period bric-a-brac to startling and evocative effect. Erected in the 19th century to house the local school, the museum building was later used by the Nazis to accommodate the camp’s 10- to 15-year-old boys. The haunting images painted by these children still decorate the walls. A newer branch is housed in the former Magdeburg Barracks (Magdeburská kasárna), which served as the seat of the Jewish ‘town council’. Here you can visit a reconstructed dormitory, and look at exhibits on the extraordinarily rich cultural life – music, theatre, fine arts and literature – that somehow flourished against this backdrop of fear. There is also a small exhibit in the grim Crematorium in the Jewish Cemetery just off Bohušovická brána, about 750m south of the main square. The Ghetto Museum has good multilingual self-guide pamphlets, a large selection of books for sale, and guides (some of them ghetto survivors) to offer assistance.
You can take a self-guided tour of the Lesser Fortress through the prison barracks, isolation cells, workshops and morgues, past execution grounds and former mass graves. It would be hard to invent a more menacing location, and it is only while wandering through the seemingly endless tunnels beneath the walls that you begin to fully appreciate the vast dimensions of the fortress. The Nazis’ mocking concentration camp slogan, Arbeit Macht Frei (‘Work Makes You Free’), hangs above the gate. In front of the fortress is a National Cemetery , established in 1945 for those exhumed from the Nazis’ mass graves. A combined ticket for both the Ghetto Museum and Lesser Fortress is 200/150Kč.
