Theresienstadt survivor says invasion by Russian Army prevented the completion of the gas chambers there

Way back on May 24, 2012, I blogged about Claude Lanzmann’s new documentary film, entitled Last of the Unjust, which will be shown at the Cannes film festival on Saturday and is expected to win an award.  I also blogged about Lanzmann’s film and the gas chambers at Theresienstadt here.

The Last of the Unjust mentions Nisko, the first settlement where the Jews were sent by Adolf Eichmann.  Dr. Wolf Murmelstein, the son of Benjamin Murmelstein, wrote an essay about his father and the Nisko settlement, which you can read on my website here.

The subject of gas chambers at the Theresienstadt concentration camp has been in the news lately, due to the release of Claude Lanzmann’s new film featuring Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish leader at Theresienstadt, who gave testimony 10 years ago about the gas chambers at Theresienstadt for Lanzmann’s film Shoah.  His testimony wound up on the cutting room floor, but has now been included in Lanzmann’s new film.  You can read about Lanzmann and the film here.

In a recent news article which you can read in full here, Inge Auerbacher, a child survivor of Theresienstadt, [Terezin], was quoted as saying this:

Only the invasion of that area by the Russian Army prevented the completion of gas chambers at Terezin, [Auerbacher] said.

Inge Auerbacher was also quoted as saying this in her recent talk to students in Montana:

Holocaust deniers are everywhere she said, noting that the president of Iran claims the crematories in the concentration camps were just bakery ovens.

I also blogged here about the claim that the cremation ovens at Auschwitz were bakery ovens.

Inge was lucky to have survived the Theresienstadt camp; you can read about the death statistics at Theresienstadt on my website here.

This quote is from the newspaper article about Inge Auerbacher’s talk:

Auerbacher was born on Dec. 31, 1934, in a little German village, that was over 1,000 years old. There were 60 Jewish families there and they happily lived next door to Christian families. Her father was a textile merchant and a disabled World War I veteran. Her grandfather, who lived in another village, was also a German war veteran. “We were very patriotic. We died for Germany,” she said. “Yes, we were Jewish, but we were good Germans.”

Her name, she pointed out, is a very common German name for a girl. She wore German clothing, she spoke German, the only difference, she said, was where she worshipped (sic).

Things began to change in 1938 with the beginning of riots against Jewish neighborhoods. On Nov. 10, 1938, riots struck her village, and mobs broke out every window in the homes and businesses of Jews and her father and grandfather were arrested and taken to the concentration camp at Dachau. The mob desecrated the synagogue in their community.

Somehow, after a few weeks, her father and grandfather were allowed to come home, and they immediately began trying to find a way to leave Germany. They sold their home and moved in with her grandparents in an even smaller village. They applied to immigrate to the United States and were put on a waiting list more than 10 years long. “We were stuck, with great hopes of leaving,” she said.

Auerbacher recalls the time they lived in this little village as her only childhood. During that time, her grandfather died of a broken heart from the way Germany betrayed its war veterans and from the physical abuse he endured at Dachau.

In 1941, deportations in her part of Germany started in the winter. The school was closed and she never finished first grade. She didn’t go back to school until she was 15 years old. Her grandmother was deported first. The family did not know for some time, but she was taken to the Black Forest and shot. She lies in a mass grave today. Eventually, Auerbacher, her mother and father, were deported to Terezin [Theresienstadt], a concentration camp built in an old military garrison in what is now the Czech Republic.

Auerbacher remembers that they could take almost nothing when they were deported. A few articles of clothing, metal dishes, a bedroll, and, for her, her special dolly, “Marlene,” named after the German-American movie star Marlene Dietrich.

Her time in Terezin is a blur of brutality, squalor, hunger, sickness and sorrow. She suffered scarlet fever there and many other illnesses. Her hair was filled with lice and her body covered with boils. “Hunger was a constant companion. You didn’t think about anything else but food, food, food,” she said. “You either lived or you died,” she said.

Terezin was a staging place, a transit area where two-thirds of those sent there were eventually shipped to killing centers, and a third died there. Of the 50,000 children under the age of 15 who came through Terezin, only a little more than 100 survived. Only the invasion of that area by the Russian Army prevented the completion of gas chambers at Terezin, she said.

Throughout this brutal time, she said, her father never lost hope. He told his wife, you wait and see, you’ll ride in a car again someday.

His faith sustained them, and on May 8, they were finally liberated. Eventually, they returned to her grandmother’s village and lived in an apartment there. “We were a miracle that our family survived,” she said.

[...]

After retiring, she became an activist for the Holocaust, traveling to Europe, revisiting Terezin and the places of her youth, writing her books and starting on speaking tours.

Theresienstadt, now known as Terezin, is most famous for the Red Cross visit in June 1944.  A second Red Cross visit was scheduled for April 6, 1945 and Adolf Eichmann came to Theresienstadt on March 5, 1945 to check out the camp.  According to some Holocaust experts, that is when he ordered gas chambers to be built at Theresienstadt because the gas chambers at Auschwitz had been closed in November 1944, and he wanted to continue the genocide of the Jews at Theresienstadt.

By March 1945, there was complete chaos in Europe in the final days of the war and Theresienstadt had become shabby again, after the first Red Cross visit in June 1944. Most of the able-bodied Jews in the camp had been sent on the transports to Auschwitz, where there were factories in which the Jews were being put to work for the German war effort. Most of the remaining inmates were elderly people or young children, like 10 year-old Inge Auerbacher, who were not able to work. Eichmann ordered the town to be cleaned up again, and the ghetto passed a second Red Cross inspection in 1945 with a good report.

On April 15, 1945, all the Danish Jews in the ghetto were transported back to Denmark with the help of the Red Cross.

On May 3, 1945, the Nazis turned the whole Theresienstadt camp over to Red Cross workers who now had the difficult task of trying to save the survivors from a raging typhus epidemic.

Typhus had been brought into the Theresienstadt ghetto by 13,454 survivors of the eastern concentration camps who began arriving after April 20, 1945. Some of them had been sent to Auschwitz a few months earlier and were now returning. In the final days of the war, the Theresienstadt ghetto became a hell hole, where a typhus epidemic was totally out of control, just like the epidemic in the unfortunate Bergen-Belsen camp which the Nazis had voluntarily turned over to the British on April 15, 1945.

Typhus is caused by body lice, and the Germans had tried unsuccessfully to control the lice in the death camps in Poland by using Zyklon B, the same chemical that they used to kill the Jews in the homicidal gas chambers.

Way back in 2010, I blogged about the gas chambers at Theresienstadt here.

Lanzmann should get in touch with Inge Auerbacher immediately and set her straight about her denial of the gas chambers at Theresienstadt, which were most certainly finished, according to his new film.  Holocaust denial is against the law in 17 countries and Auerbacher could wind up in prison for 5 years for saying that the gas chambers at Terezin were not finished because the Russian Army arrived in the nick of time.

The children of the Theresienstadt ghetto

As every student of the Holocaust knows, there were 1.5 million children who were killed by the Nazis.  As Heinrich Himmler famously said, in his second speech at Poznan on Oct. 6, 1943: “I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – that is, to kill them or have them killed – and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up.”  Actually, he said this in German: “Ich hielt mich nämlich nicht für berechtigt, die Männer auszurotten- sprich also, umzubringen oder umbringen zu lassen – und die Rächer in Gestalt der Kinder für unsere Söhne und Enkel groß werden zu lassen.”

So we know what Himmler was planning all along.  In spite of this, Jewish children were sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto and treated very well for a year or two before they were shipped off to the Auschwitz II camp, known as Birkenau.  The Czech prisoners from Theresienstadt were allowed to live for another six months at Birkenau, in a special “family camp,” where families were allowed to live together; they were allowed to wear their own clothes and they were treated as privileged prisoners before being sent to the gas chamber.

The old walled fort which became the Theresienstadt ghetto

Theresienstadt was called a “concentration camp” by the Nazis, but it is usually referred to today as a “ghetto.”  It was formerly an old military fort that was like a small town.  Today, it is an actual town, called Terezin, where people live.

Theresienstadt was the designated site for the deportation of Jewish children from the orphanages in the Greater German Reich. Children were also sent to the ghetto with their parents or other relatives. Approximately 10,000 children passed through the Theresienstadt ghetto.

The drawings and paintings, produced by these children in their art classes at Theresienstadt, are known the world over. Some of their artwork hangs at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Many other Holocaust museums display their work also. The Jewish Museum in Prague has a collection of 4,000 pieces of children’s art from Theresienstadt.

Barracks for young Jewish girls at Theresienstadt

Building L410, shown in the photo above, is located on Hauptstrasse, the main street of Theresienstadt. This was the barracks for Jewish orphan girls from 8 to 16 years old. The older girls, aged 14 to 16, had to work during the day, but they took  art classes at night. The building also had a basement where concert practice took place. Mrs. Friedl Dicker-Brandejsova gave art lessons to the young girls.

The children were encouraged to express their feelings in their artwork. Some of the drawings that have been preserved show practice sheets where the children were obviously being taught the various elements of drawing. The children depicted their surroundings in the ghetto in their drawings and watercolors, but they also painted what they remembered from their world before they were deported to Theresienstadt.

Remarkably, the drawings of the children were not censored by the Nazis, who allowed the children the freedom to express themselves on paper. It is even more remarkable that the Nazis carefully preserved the artwork, after the children were deported to the Birkenau death camp.

Approximately 8,000 children, both boys and girls, were deported to other camps from Theresienstadt.  Their paintings, which now hang all over the world, are a unique memorial to the innocent children of the Holocaust.

First view of the Theresienstadt ghetto from a tour bus

The first view of Theresienstadt, as seen from the tour buses that come from Prague, is shown in the photo above.  The park in the foreground is the Stadtpark and the building in the background is the Ghetto Museum, which is located at the northwest end of Hauptstrasse. The Museum was dedicated on October 17, 1991, the 50ieth anniversary of Nazi’s decision to deport the Jews from the Greater German Reich to the Theresienstadt ghetto.

Before the Nazis decided in October 1941 to turn the old military garrison town of Theresienstadt into a concentration camp, the museum building was being used for a school. During the period when Theresienstadt was a camp for Jews, the museum building was originally known as L417; it was used to house boys between 10 and 15 years old.

Barracks for young boys at Theresienstadt is now a Museum

When I visited the Museum, I purchased a book entitled “Ghetto Museum Terezin” written by PhDr. Vojtech, CSc, Ludmila Chladkova, and PhDr. Erik Polak, CSc. According to this book, the boys’ barracks in L417, which is now the Ghetto Museum, had its own self-administration, which was the so-called SKID. The boys’ barracks was under the supervision of Professor Valtr Eisinge, who was transported in September 1944 to Auschwitz, where he died.

The boys’ barracks had an emblem and an anthem.  The boys were allowed to publish their own newsletter, called Vedem, for almost two years.  This publication was like a children’s magazine, which contained fiction and poetry, written by the boys, as well as news from the ghetto.

The former boys’ barracks, now the Ghetto Museum, has a courtyard which was formerly the playground for the boys; it is now a Memorial to the Children of Theresienstadt. The photograph below shows a statue by Italian artist Emilio Greco and a Star of David which have been placed there. On the walls in the background are memorial plaques; the statue of a naked woman is shown in close-up in the second photograph below in the courtyard of the former boys’ barracks.

Courtyard of the Ghetto Museum which was formerly the boys’ barracks

Close-up of statue in courtyard of Ghetto Museum

If any of the young boys, who lived in the building which is now the Ghetto Museum, are still alive, they will love the current artwork in the courtyard where they used to play.  The Nazis would never have allowed such artwork in a Memorial to Children.

Former barrack for infants at Theresienstadt

At the corner of Rathausgasse and Langestrasse I photographed the building, shown above, that is currently the post office in Terezin, but in the former ghetto, it was a home for infants. It also housed a pre-school and a kindergarten.

Some books say there were 207 babies born in the Theresienstadt ghetto, but others say it was 275. All adults up to age 60, and young people over the age of 14, had to work in Theresienstadt, so the infants and small children were taken care of, by some of the prisoners, in the building shown in the photo above, and returned to their mothers in the evening.

The building for the babies also had space for theater performances in the evening. In addition, there was a bakery and the kitchen which supplied the food for the Jews who lived there. To the right of the post office is the current town hall, which is barely visible in the photo above.

Across Langestrasse, to the west of the current Post Office shown in the photograph above, is a block of buildings which were used as homes for Jewish children in the former ghetto. Some of the buildings in this block were also used for theater and cultural performances and building L216 in this block was the children’s library.

One of the barracks buildings for young children at Theresienstadt

Another building on Langestrasse, which faces the market square on the west side of the square, is today the Culture House of Terezin, shown in the photograph below. During the ghetto days, there was a theater here where live performances were given. It was also where the ghetto guard was housed. This was a unit of young male inmates, organized by the Nazis to keep order in the ghetto. Most of them were eventually sent on the transports to the death camps, and they were replaced by 100 Jewish men over forty who made up the new ghetto guard.  (Did you catch that?  The young men were sent to death camps to be killed, while the older men were allowed to live.)

Building where the Jewish ghetto guards lived at Theresienstadt

The building next to the Ghettowache on Langestrasse, across from the market square, is the Sapper barracks where older Jewish prisoners were housed. The building is shown in the photograph below. There was also an auxiliary hospital here for patients with heart disease and tuberculosis. There were plenty of inmates to staff this hospital, as one out of 7 of the adult males in the ghetto was a doctor. Cultural programs and lectures were given here as well and there was a synagogue in the attic. Today this building is the Social Care Home of Terezin.

A Synagogue was in the attic of this building

After seeing these photos, the reader might be confused.  Why were the Jewish children treated so well before they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau to be killed?  This was all part of the diabolical plan of the Nazis.  The purpose was to fool the public, so that their real plan of genocide would not be suspected.

In case you think I’m writing facetiously, which I have been known to do in the past, here is a quote from another blog post that says essentially the same thing.

During World War II, prisoners of the Theresienstadt ghetto — used as a transit camp for Auschwitz — were given space and time dedicated to pursuing the arts.  For the German government, it was a way to hide their atrocities from the rest of the world.  For the prisoners, it was an outlet to deal with the extraordinary, horrible events that had enveloped the world.

Gas chamber at Theresienstadt…

A few years ago, I was shocked to hear newsman Sandor Vanocur say, in a very serious tone, on a TV program, that there was a gas chamber at Theresienstadt.  He didn’t give any details, just moved on to the next subject, after dropping that bombshell. Theresienstadt is an old fortified town in what is now the Czech Republic; the Czechs have renamed it Terezin. During World War II, Theresienstadt was turned into a Nazi concentration camp for elderly and prominent Jews, including musicians and artists.

Terezin or Theresienstadt?

Every time I read about the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and the author calls it Terezin, it is like the sound of fingernails scraping across a blackboard.  Today I read this on a blog named “The Adventures of History Girl” and it was upsetting to me that a person calling herself “History Girl” used the name Terezin for Theresienstadt.

Here is a quote from her blog:

“It began as a fortress northwest of Prague built by Joseph II in 1780 and named after his mother, Maria Teresia, though it was called Terezin.”  [...]

“The Gestapo turned Terezin into a Jewish Ghetto, calling it Theresienstadt.”

History Girl has it ass backwards.  The 18th century walled town in what is now the Czech Republic was originally called Theresienstadt and it was called Theresienstadt at the time that Hitler sent the Jews there.  Theresienstadt means Theresa’s city in German; the city was originally named after the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. Only after the formation of the new country of Czechoslovakia, following World War I, did the town became known by the Czech name Terezin (pronounced TARA-zeen which rhymes with kerosene). When Hitler took over what was left of Czechoslovakia in 1938, the name reverted back to Theresienstadt.

At one time, the Czechs had their own dynasty, known as the Premyslides; the “Good King Wencelas” was the ruler of the Czechs in the 10th century. The Czech homeland of Bohemia, which along with Moravia, now constitutes the Czech Republic, came under the rule of the Austrian Hapsburg empire in 1526.

It was Joseph II of the Hapsburg family, the ruler of the Austrian Empire, who built the town and named it Theresienstadt, after his mother, the Empress Maria Theresa. This is the same Joseph II, in whose honor Josefov, the Jewish quarter in Prague, was originally named Josefstadt in 1850.

The history of the German people in Europe goes back 2,000 years to the early days of the Roman Empire, but Germany was not yet a united country when Theresienstadt was built; in 1780 the German people lived in a collection of small states, each separately ruled by a prince or a duke. The two most powerful German states were Prussia, ruled by the Hohenzollern family, and Austria, ruled by the Hapsburg family.

Bastion on southeast side of the old fortress, Sudeten mountains in background

In 1780, when the town of Theresienstadt was originally built as a military garrison at the junction of the Ohre and Elbe rivers, near the Sudeten mountain range in the province of Bohemia, the Czech people, who had lived in this area since the 5th century, did not have an independent country of their own. Bohemia was part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in 1780.

It was in the middle of a territorial fight between Prussia and Austria that the Austrians thought it necessary to build a military garrison at Theresienstadt for protection against the Prussians and their powerful army, led by Frederick the Great.

Theresienstadt fortress, built in 1780

Intended to accommodate 14,500 soldiers at the most, Theresienstadt was originally built as a fortified town surrounded by two sets of brick walls and bastions jutting out on all sides, resembling the points of a star, with a wide moat between the walls. The construction of these ramparts and the barracks for the soldiers took ten years to complete.

The anticipated attack by the Prussians never came, and the fortifications were never tested; the moat was never filled, except for a little water used as a test just after the walls were built. Theresienstadt is on the west bank of the Ohre river, and on the east bank, the Emperor built a separate smaller fortress, also surrounded by brick walls, bastions at the corners, and a moat.

The Small Fortress was built as a prison and was used for this purpose throughout its history, up until recent times when it was converted into a museum.  The Small Fortress was not part of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Gate into the Small Fortress, which was built as a prison

My photo taken inside the Small Fortress

Close-up of the Arbeit Macht Frei sign inside the Small Fortress

The two photos above show the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign inside the Small Fortress.

The most famous inmate of the Small Fortress was Gavrilo Princip, the teen-aged anarchist from Serbia, who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an act that touched off World War I in 1914. Princip is today regarded as a hero by the people of the Czech Republic because they gained their independence from the Germans as a result of World War I.

Moat around the Small Fortress was never filled with water

The last prisoners to be held at the Small Fortress were German war criminals who were incarcerated there by the Allies from 1945 to 1948, awaiting trial and execution. Thus, the fortress at Theresienstadt, which had never been used for its original purpose, was nevertheless involved in two world wars.

Christian graves outside the walls of the Small Fortress

Most of the graves outside the Small Fortress are Christian graves, but the photo that is usually shown has a Star of David in the section of Jewish graves.

During the Holocaust, Theresienstadt was one of the most infamous transit centers in Hitler’s systematic plan to exterminate European Jewry. Theresienstadt is usually called a ghetto, but it was classified as a concentration camp by the Nazis. Today, the town is inhabited by Czech citizens.  The photo above shows how the town looked in the year 2000.

Near the end of World War II, the camp was turned over to the Red Cross and it was liberated by the Soviet Union in May 1945. As soon as a typhus epidemic was brought under control, the prisoners were released and the Small Fortress became a prison for German Nazis from 1945 to 1948.

With the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, Czechoslovakia became a country again, and all the ethnic Germans, except for the few who could prove that they were anti-Fascist during the war, were expelled from their homes and sent into war-torn Germany, many of them dying along the way from hunger and exhaustion.

The Czechs and the Jews exacted their revenge by attacking these refugees as they fled to Germany. Many of the refugees had to live for as long as 18 years in the former Nazi concentration camps, such as Dachau, until they could find new jobs and homes, as Germany was slowly rebuilt.

On January 1, 1993, the states of Bohemia and Moravia became the Czech Republic.

Theresienstadt survivor tells British school children about Red Cross visit

Theresienstadt is a former military fort in what is now the Czech Republic; during World War II, the Nazis turned it into a concentration camp for the prominent Jews, including many artists and musicians. Theresienstadt is now known as Terezin.

Theresienstadt is famous for die Verschönerung, the beautification program in which the Nazis cleaned up the ghetto in preparation for a visit on June 23, 1944 by two Swiss delegates of the International Red Cross and two representatives of the government of Denmark.