5/24 Friday
Today, we're taking a short trip to
the fortress city of Terevin, which became a Nazi prison camp and then a
transit camp for Jews and others destined for the bigger extermination camps in
Poland and Germany. The bus ride was about an hour, very comfortable, and
interesting to see the surrounding countryside. Once there, we saw the 18th
century walls of the fortress city that became the prison, along a tree-lined
avenue along a memorial cemetery. We got a self-guiding map and walk through on
our own, with just a few tours coming in around us. We were glad that we didn’t
join a tour after all, because they stopped at the main rooms and courtyards,
but missed most of the rest of the sights, which were truly worth seeing. For
the most part, the rooms spoke for themselves, a guide’s embellishments weren’t
needed. The “barber shop,” “delousing room,” hospital, bunkrooms, all were
tragically bare and still. We followed one doorway into the ramparts and found
ourselves following a narrow, dark tunnel through the fortress outer walls,
alone. It went on and on, and started to get worrisome, as every potential path
out led to a locked gate. The tours never came through here. Finally, we came
to an exit onto the grassy yard that served as the execution area, and nearby,
a mass gravesite. Then we stopped at the movie house, a small cinema for the
prison guard families. We saw an interesting film about the use of Terevin as
propaganda to demonstrate to the Red Cross that the prisoners were being well
treated. A secondary prison area held what looked like spacious solitary
confinement cells, compared to the crowded bunkrooms, until we learned that
“solitary” usually included eight to twelve prisoners. A couple of the
bunkrooms have been made into astonishingly beautiful art galleries.
We
moved on into the main fortress which is the city of Terevin, also taken over
completely by the Nazis as a prison. The fortress walls proved very useful.
This was mostly a transitional station, while the bigger extermination camps
were being built, people were sent to Terevin for a while, and if they survived
the conditions, they were shipped out to the death camps. We spent just a
little time in the Ghetto Museum, full of personal artifacts. We sat on a bench
in the town square waiting for our bus, watching local people coming home from
work, children stopping for ice cream on the way home from school, all very
normal village sights. What must it be like to like in such a place now. How
did they come here after the original families were turned out?
2 Videos Included
Nazi Prison and Getto at Terezin Part 1
Nazi Prison and Getto at Terezin Part 2
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