Good Trips to Bad Places: A Winter Day at Terezin Concentration Camp

We recently received a request from one of our readers to write a post on traveling to see the concentration camp Terezin (also referred to as
Theresienstadt).  I initially thought this would be an easy task, but finding the right words to encapsulate the sobering experience of walking through a concentration camp is much different than whimsically describing a trek to the world’s largest pineapple.  It’s hard to explain feeling excited about visiting a place that has seen such a horrible past, but I think that excitement tells a great story about why we travel in the first place.

At around 5AM, I woke up in my quiet hotel room in central Prague, checked my map, and headed out to the bus terminal to catch a local bus to Terezin.  After 30 minutes of standing in the cold and  2 hours of riding through beautiful countryside on a nice heated bus, I hopped off and walked about a quarter mile to the entrance of the camp.  Terezin was built as a fortress with the intent of keeping outsiders out and was repurposed to be a concentration camp with the intent of keeping insiders in.  This fact was hard to miss when approaching the red brick walls from the road.

As I approached the main gate, I saw rows and rows of headstones with increasing resolution.  What I experienced was not sadness for the thousands of tortured lives or shame for the cruelty of the human race but pure fascination and amazement.  How could so much disaster have been packed within a few short years and within this one tiny fortress in the middle of the calm rolling hills of the Czech Republic?  While pondering this question, I entered Terezin and signed up for an English speaking tour.

My tour guide spent the next 90 minutes flooding my brain with jaw-dropping statistics, anecdotes, and images of the World War II history of Terezin.  To give you a taste, between 100,00 and 150,000 Jews were sent there during the war.  Around 85% of the people and over 99% of the children died either due to squalid living conditions, rampant disease, and sadistic treatment or after being transfered to extermination camps like Auschwitz.  The inmates were starved, used for slave labor, subjected to freezing, and forced to live in barracks designed to hold 1/10th of the people they housed.  Not surprising enough?  With all of this going on, the Nazis managed to use Terezin as a propaganda tool.

For some reason, by 1944 concentration camps had gotten a bad rap, so the Nazis invited the Red Cross to come visit Terezin which itself was not an extermination camp.  Before the visit, the Nazis outlined a route for the visit, installed fake washrooms, put food and candy in the windows, and instructed most of residents to hide silently and others to work and play happily on the premises during the visit.

Unfortunately, the facade worked, and the Red Cross concluded that all was well in Terezin.  In fact, the scam worked so well that the Nazis made a propaganda film at Terezin only to ship off the Jewish film maker and crew to Auschwitz.  The prominent sign above the courtyard that reads “Arbeit macht frei” or “The work makes you free” serves as a perfect embodiment of what a terrifying facade the camp was.

Upon exiting Terezin, I had the same question I had come in with.  How could such a place exist?  I felt like I could barely endure the 2 hour wait in the rain for the bus back to Prague, and this was not a drop in the bucket of hardship.  How could humanity have let this happen, and how could part of humanity thought this to be the best course of action?  Terezin is hands down the worst place on earth that I have visited, and yet, it filled me with a great sense of satisfaction to be there.

I would recommend highly that other people go, and I will not shy away from the fact that it was a pleasant experience for me.  I was filled with an incredible sense of wonder the whole time I was there, and I could see it in other people as well.  I felt like I had gotten a glimpse of the possibilities of this world that I hadn’t known before.  It may be easy to think that this is an ugly part of world history that was abolished by our great friends the Allied Forces, but that’s not true.  Warring, cruelty, and facades are all alive and well.  If you don’t believe me, just look at a google map of North Korea or check the State Department website for the list of countries you shouldn’t visit.

I travel to learn about the world and to learn about people, myself included.  Whether it’s wonder at how and why the biggest pineapple was constructed or how and why a hell-on-earth could have been built just outside of Prague, I love to feel a sense of wonder.  It reminds me that I’m getting to know the world around me and that no matter how much I’ve already seen, the world will still have more to teach me.