Lidice and Terezin

 

I am in such a time crunch, unfortunately, and really feel horrible that I don't even have the time to write enough to fully give these places the justice they deserve. I am days behind on writing stuff and really haven't had the time to put much together. If nothing else though, I want to get something down for my own memories, as this is ultimately serving as my journal. My blogging app just finished freaking out on me in the last hour that I've forced myself to finally get this all down, but luckily it seems much better now . . .

We had a pretty somber day on Friday, as we visited both Lidice and Terezin.

Lidice is, or was, a village in the Czech Republic. Another result of the Heydrich assassination, was the blame that Hitler put on many individuals and communities. There was a supposed connection that Hitler had found between the assassination and this small town of Lidice, but no such connection can be found today. Visiting the museum, there was some great documentation of all of the people living within the village, so I believe that if such a connection did exist than it would still be clear to us today. Instead, what happened at Lidice was just a way to remind people the power that Hitler had and what could happen to you and your community if involved in any type of conspiracy. Below is a picture I found online of Lidice before 1942:

Essentially, this whole entire village was completely wiped out by the Nazis. Every single male over the age of 15 was shot on the spot. All females over a certain age were sent off to work camps. And all children with blonde hair and blue eyes were sent to Germany to be adopted-- the other children were sent to the gas chambers immediately. Looking at what was once Lidice, you would never even think that it once was an entire village. It is literally just an open field now. All that remains of Lidice is a little bit of the foundations from the largest farm-- by which all the men were killed-- the school house, and the church. There is a big monument for the children of Lidice, which I will have pictures of below. One of them was stollen a few years ago, which really discusted our group. It was really kind of eery walking around the field. All I could really imagine while looking around were children running around in all of these cool looking spots that I felt like a child might like to play. Even the cemetery there was completely dug up by the Nazis. Being in this place was just so surreal, because it was impossible to fully imagine it as an entire village. Here are some photos from online of after the Nazis destroyed the village in 1942:

 

 

Here are some photos of mine:

 

 

There is now "New Lidice", where about 100 surviving women returned to after the war. The goverment paid to have it put together for them, to represent new beginings after the war. I'm not sure I would want to return to such a place . . .

Terezin was just such a weird experience too. Terezin is not an extermination camp, but so many tons of people still died because of the horrible conditions. We first visited the crematorium. It was not used to kill Jews, but rather to bury them. The burial grounds within Terezin were completely full, to the point that mass burials were utilised regularly before the crematorium was completed. I wasn't able to photograph inside the crematorium itself, but here are pictures from outside with the mass burial site:

Petr, my professor, guided us throughout the day. He explained beforehand that the ghetto of Terezin doesn't really look any different from any other town in Czech Republic. It hasn't really been altered at all since WWII, but many people live there today. The ghetto really did look like any other town. Had I not known, I would have never guessed it to be a part of a concentration camp. We went to see the hidden synogogue that many Jews visited in secrecy during their time at Terezin. There was major flooding in 2002, so unfortunately it (and so many other things in the Prague area) have noticable damage. The fact that this synogogue was there was really cool though. It was found in communist times but continued to be kept a secret because it would have almost definitely been destroyed by the communists otherwise.

The part of Terezin that actually looks like what you think of when you think "concentration camp", was the prison. Of course, people were sent to prison for absolutely ridiculous things though, so it wasn't like you had to be a hardened criminal to experience living in this place. There was this big room filled with this long wooden triple bunk bed that 120 people shared, each person getting about 30 centemeters to themselves . . . We only saw one of these rooms, but there were many more, as these were the regular living chambers. There were also cells, many without windows, which "criminals" were sent to when they awaited their execution. Many of them were there literally for months, just sitting in the dark. When sent to those cells, people knew that they were going to die, it was more just a question of when. Visiting the shower room was most eery to me. I think I may have seen a film or something that had depicted a concentration camp shower, but for some reason I just had this image of all these hundreds of people being mushed together under the shower, trying to get as much water in the few minutes that they had. We learned that females were given one shower per month, males one every 3 months. Each shower for the 120 people last 5 minutes and each shower head was shared by 8 people. These horrible hygiene conditions are why so many people died, even in the "good" conditions of Terezin.

After the shower room, we saw the shaving room. We walked in and I immediately thought it odd that there were actual mirrors here for the men to do their shaving-- or even that they got to at all on their own. What was then explained to us is how that whole entire room was a set-up for the Red Cross visit to Terezin. With all of the rumors circulating about the Nazi concentration camps, the red Cross planned a special visit. Hitler had them visit terezin, because "it was the most representative of the concentration camps". Terezin was actually the most mild of concentration camps, were Jewish war heros of WWI, and other deserving Jews, were sent "as a reward" over other camps. For that one visit though, Hitler had the entire place reworked. There were suddenly bakeries, playgrounds, and all kinds of nice things added to the ghetto and prison. He had an entire workhouse torn down to make a town square. The shaving room was a part of that hoax, the sinks weren't even hooked up to have water go through them. It was raining on and off, so I didn't want to risk damaging my camera-- plus Im not sure how I feel about personally documenting such a horrible place-- so here is a photograph of the camp from online. It is of the famous words "arbeit macht frei", or work makes you free, which we all walked under in entering the male criminal's complex.

Another interesting thing about Terezin was that it was initially an 18th century fortress used to protect the Czech lands from neighboring countries. We got to walk inside an underground tunnel through the fortress walls-- never used during the Holocaust, but still really neat!

The entire day was just so morbid. Even though Terezin is such a mild concentration camp, it's still just so disgusting the conditions that people had to live through. And regardless of not being an extermination camp, Terezin was continuously filled with famine and plague-- people were exterminated through the horrible living conditions. Knowing what this "good" camp is like, it is hard to even imagine the horrors found within other camps.