I’ve always enjoyed learning about historical events. History can be uplifting, exciting, mesmerising, but also sometimes terrifying and challenging. Today we have visited a place which I found extremely challenging but nonetheless compelling and extremely important.

The small town of Terezin in the north of the Czech Republic was home to the Theresienstadt ghetto during WW2. 

This former prison was converted by the Nazis into a transit station to house Jews before being transferred to concentration camps, and also to house specific populations of higher profile Jews such as decorated veterans or prominent individuals. As such it never really fitted the profile of a standard ghetto. It was set up as more of a propaganda tool, and hence had more cultural activities such as painting and music. The Danish Red Cross were even invited to visit so that the Nazis could demonstrate how well they looked after their prisoners, all the while covering up what was really happening to the captured Jews in Germany.

Life here was by no means a cake-walk however. Make no mistake, this was still the ghetto, and conditions were specifically engineered to stifle the life from its inhabitants. 140,000 people passed through here, and 33,000 of those died from disease or malnutrition. Most of the others were eventually transited to the concentration camps, and it’s thought only 17,000 of its former residents saw the end of the war. Many prisoners were beaten and murdered indiscriminately within its walls, and they were also allowed to die from diseases such as typhoid due to the squalid and cramped conditions.

This site is a somber representation of one of the most awful, gut-wrenching periods of human history, one that is still within living memory. We must never be allowed to forget the brutality of the final solution, and even though I knew this would be a hard visit for us, and especially hard for the kids to comprehend, it’s extremely important that we learn from the events that lead up to it, lest we allow it to happen again. 

During a visit here you can wander through the yards, bunkhouses and washrooms where the prisoners lived. The bare wooden bunks stacked three high are still on display, and you get a real sense of exactly how awful it must have been sharing these dank cells with hundreds of other doomed souls. You can also see the killing fields where the executions took place and the gallows which only ever saw action three times. It really is chilling and difficult emotionally, and probably not for everyone, but it is an experience I will never forget.