An American in Prague: Terezin Concentration Camp

On Thursday we went to the village of Terezin in the Czech Republic. Terezin was built in 1780 as a fortress. The entire town is surrounded by a moat and a river cuts right through it. It is located about an hour from the German border and is Northeast of Prague. In 1940 the gestapo were assigned to turn Terezin into a ghetto. Terezin was not an extermination camp although many people did die there. Its intent was to be a "holding cell" for the transport of Jews. It also contained the small fortress which was for prisoners of war. Except for the small fortress, Terezin did not look like the other concentration camps because the Nazis used the exterior structures of the town buildings. Just the interiors were changed to house up 50,000 persons at one time. In other words, it was not built in the style displayed in TV and movies. Terezin was the concentration camp that was used for propaganda to show the Red Cross that the isolated Jews were not being mistreated. The Red Cross stayed for only six hours and never entered the small fortress.

After visiting Terezin Concentration camp the theoretical illusions that surrounded Nazism and its existence were shattered. I never doubted that the Holocaust had occurred, it just never seemed like a past reality because I had only seen pictures and heard testimonies. I am more afraid to utter Adolph Hitler’s name than I am to say a curse word. Concentration camps like Terezin are proof of how destructive and evil mankind can be to one another and that is a very scary thought. People do not want to accept that every single person has the potential to enact this horror and become a part of something like this. I don’t believe that I would have had the guts to stand up to the Nazis regime if they had forced my family to help their cause. I believe everybody would like to think that they would do something and be the hero we were all taught to be, but I doubt many would in reality. That is another reason why the Holocaust haunts us. We don’t want to think that we are anything like the people who supported or were the Nazis regime, but we are. We will always share that we are all human no matter how many times history paints Hitler and his followers as demonic creatures and tries to separate humans from Nazis.