A Habsburg garrison town the Nazis turned into a ghetto and a transit camp, and then presented to the Red Cross as a model settlement. An hour from Prague and very hard.
What it was
An eighteenth-century Habsburg garrison town, built as a fortress and named for Empress Maria Theresa. In 1941 the Nazis expelled the civilian population and turned the whole town into a ghetto, and the Small Fortress across the river into a Gestapo prison.
Around 150,000 Jews passed through Terezín. Roughly 33,000 died there of starvation, disease and the conditions. Around 88,000 were deported onward, principally to Auschwitz. Fewer than 4,000 of those survived.
Around 15,000 children passed through. Fewer than 250 survived.
The deception
Terezín’s particular horror is that it was used as propaganda. It was presented as a model settlement — a “spa town” where elderly and prominent Jews were said to be living comfortably.
Ahead of a 1944 Red Cross inspection, the Nazis beautified the town: they planted gardens, opened a café and a bank issuing worthless currency, staged a football match and a children’s opera, and deported thousands of people to Auschwitz to reduce the overcrowding. The delegation was walked along a prepared route, accepted what it saw, and reported favourably.
A propaganda film was made afterwards. Most of those who appeared in it, including its director, were deported and murdered when it was finished.
The culture
Because the ghetto held so much of the Czech Jewish intelligentsia, an extraordinary cultural life existed inside it — concerts, lectures, theatre, and composition. Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krása, Pavel Haas and Gideon Klein all wrote music here. Krása’s children’s opera Brundibár was performed 55 times by child casts that had to be constantly replaced.
All four composers were murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.
The children’s drawings, made in secret art classes run by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, survive because she hid two suitcases of them before her own deportation. About 4,500 exist. Some are in the Ghetto Museum here and some in the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague.
Visiting
The Ghetto Museum in the town, in a former school.
The Magdeburg Barracks, with a reconstructed dormitory and exhibitions on the music, art and writing.
The Small Fortress across the river — the Gestapo prison, with cells, the execution ground and the cemetery in front of it.
The Columbarium, the crematorium and the Jewish cemetery.
A combined ticket covers the sites and a shuttle connects them.
How to visit
Allow the full day and do not attach it to anything else.
Guided tours from Prague are widely available and remove the transport problem. Independent travel is straightforward: buses from Nádraží Holešovice take about an hour.
Children: the memorial’s own guidance suggests it is not suitable for younger children. That is worth taking seriously.
Photography of a place like this warrants restraint. There are no rules against it in most areas and the ordinary courtesy applies.
Take food and water — the town has very little.
Why go
Because it is an hour from Prague and because the specific thing Terezín demonstrates — a functioning deception, presented to inspectors who wanted to believe it — is not something you understand from a book in the way you understand it from standing in the town where it was staged.
More Day Trips
Kutná Hora
A silver-mining town that rivalled Prague in the fourteenth century, with a Gothic cathedral built by miners and a chapel decorated with the bones of forty thousand people.
Český Krumlov
A medieval town inside a hairpin bend of the Vltava, with the second-largest castle in the country and a baroque theatre that still uses its original stage machinery.