The Children of Terezin

Today we went on a field trip for my entire history class. As expected, we went to the Jewish Quarter. I was really excited to go because this is the one section of Prague I have had yet to really explore. We went to 3 synagogues, all of which were beautiful. It wasn't the beauty of these places that has really stuck with me though; what has stuck with me are the two memorials in Pinkus Synagogue.Pinkus Synagogue was built as a memorial to 80,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust, from the region surrounding Prague. The main level's walls are painted with first the surname of a family, and then first names of individuals with birth dates and death dates following. The entire place is just covered in this! It was really a lot to take in. I started out okay, and was pretty much just looking around at all the names, but by the time we made it into another room full of names I felt really kind of overwhelmed by it. I've been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. before, but this one memorial was so much more moving than that entire museum had been for me. That is kind of a bold statement because of how impactful the Holocaust Museum is, but there really is no comparison. A part of that, I'm sure, is being physically in an area that was so heavily impacted by the Holocaust. It is such a different experience to be visiting a memorial for something so tragic right in the area that the tragedy took place. We weren't able to take photos in the synogogue, but here are some that I found online:

In the upstairs of the synogogue, was something even more horrifying. Friedl Dicker was a teacher at Terezin, a concentration camp in Northern Czech Republic. Terezin was considered by the Nazis to be a "good" concentration camp, if such a thing existed. Before being deported to Auschwitz, where she was certain to die, Friedl Dicker hid two suitcases full of the Terezin children's artwork. Right after WWII, the suitcases were found with over 4,500 drawings the children had created while at the concentration camp. All of the artwork on display reflect the children's views of the war, Terezin, hopes of returning home, death itself, and so on. Petr, my professor, explained that being a child there, your chances of survival were ultimately non-existent-- about 130 of 15,000 brought to Terezin survived-- so many of the pieces of art are literally all that is left to be remembered of these children.

It was really just so sad to see all of the artwork. Some of them were happy and more focused on before coming to Terezin or hopes for leaving Terezin, while others were just so truly morbid. I would look at each drawing, and then at the little plaque next to it with the child's name, birthdate, deathdate (if applicable, which most of the time it was), and then the title of their drawing. It felt so much more personal having a name to put with each drawing. I would look at the picture and then hope there wouldn't be a deathdate on the plaque when I checked. There were very few there that had been marked as survivors. Each time I found one, I personally felt some kind of sense of accomplishment for them, knowing that they had made it out alive. Most of the time though, I just felt so sad for the children and sorry for the unfortunate death they had faced. I had to really fight back some tears here, but I definitely wasn't the only one-- there was a lot of sniffling in the room. Again, I wasn't able to take photographs in the synogogue, but a quick Google search of the synogogue brings up a lot of results! Here are a few:

We go to Terezin (the town) on Friday, so I am assuming we will be visiting the concentration camp as well. I've also been trying hard to get together a trip to Krakow, Poland between ending the program here and flying to South Africa. Part of what I've been trying to do there, is visit Auschwitz. I think that today was a good taste of how awful it will feel to visit those places, and how emotionally tolling it might be. I kept it together fine today, but there's no doubt in my mind that actually visiting the concentration camps will be like this experience multiplied by a million.