The plan to gas all the Jews at Theresienstadt, or if that wasn’t enough, to drown them

Holocaust Survivor Inge Auerbacher is scheduled to give a talk to 7th and 8th students at Clarksburg, MA on Wednesday, May 22, 2013.  Auerbacher claims to be one of only 100 children to have survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp; there was a total of 15,000 children in the camp. She will be telling these American students about the atrocities in the camp, located only a few miles from Prague in the Czech Republic.

You can see photos of Theresienstadt on my website here.

The Clarksburg students have been studying the Holocaust since March and have read Auerbacher’s book, entitled I Am a Star.  (The Star refers to the Star of David which the Jews were forced to wear.)

The Nazis forced all Jews to wear a Star of David

I previously blogged here about Inge Auerbacher and her claim that the Theresienstadt gas chamber was never finished and the Jews were saved by the Russian troops who arrived to liberate the camp on May 8, 1945.  Before the Russians arrived, the Theresienstadt camp had been turned over to the Red Cross and the SS guards and administrators had left.

I looked up Auerbacher’s book on the Internet and found this condensed information, which was taken from her book, at this website:

During the last days of World War II, orders were given to build gas chambers at Terezín. The plan was to kill all the remaining Jews. At Terezín they were to kill the Jews by gassing them or by drowning in a specially prepared areas. Not one Jew in all of Europe was to stay alive. It was only a rush of events that spared Inge and some of the other prisoners their lives. The guards fearing capture by the Allies, began to burn all the camp records. The evidence of death had to be destroyed. At the beginning of May, the guards, living outside the barricades, ran away. They made last efforts to kill the remaining Jews by shooting wildly and throwing hand grenades into the camp as they fled.

The quote about “gassing them or by drowning” is on page 66 of Auerbacher’s book.

Before reading this information from Auerbacher’s book, I had never heard about the guards at Theresienstadt “throwing hand grenades into the camp as they fled,” as Auerbacher wrote on page 67 of her book.  Thank God that Auerbacher survived and can educate elementary school children in America about this atrocity.   I wonder how many Red Cross workers were hit by the wild shooting and the hand grenades thrown at them.  Auerbacher’s book should be made into a movie, so that we can see just how cruel the Nazis were.

Students who want to learn more about Theresienstadt can study this quote, from an article on this website:

The situation in Terezin [Theresienstadt] was influenced by the atmosphere connected with the intensive negotiations of Heinrich Himmler and his plenipotentiaries, particularly Kurt Becher, with the representatives of international Jewish organizations and the American Office for War Refugees.

On November 9 the Berlin Central Office of the Gestapo informed the Reich’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that within the framework of plans approved by Hitler on how to “make use of Jews for the German war effort in a manner other than by their work for the Reich”, a transport of 1 000 prisoners would be sent to Switzerland.

On December 6 a train dispatched from the Bergen – Belsen camp with 1 368 Jewish prisoners actually crossed the Swiss border. Among them were 97 Jews from Czechoslovakia. Four days earlier – according to the recollections of Felix Kersten whom Himmler had been using for his international political contacts – the Reichsfuhrer of the SS at a meeting in Triberg promised to free two to three thousand Jewish prisoners from Terezin on condition that the world press would not interpret this release as a sign of weakness on the part of Germany. Himmler refused to set 20 000 Terezin prisoners free. (At that time, however, such a large number of Jewish prisoners were not present in Terezin anymore.)

Shortly afterwards – on December 5 – during an inspection of Terezin, an unknown functionary of the Reich’s Security Main Office visited the Jewish Elder Benjamin Murmelstein (officially appointed as late as December 13). According to Rahm, the Commander of the camp, he was satiied [satisfied] with what he had seen. This visit gave birth to the legend that on the basis of this inspection “by a special commission from Berlin” it was decided not to liquidate Terezin but to make use of it for propaganda purposes.

Various alternatives for liquidating Terezin are documented from the circles of Prague’s Gestapo and from Eichmann’s Office at the Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin. There are documents about actual preparations, particularly about the building of a “food store” in Terezin ravelin No. XVIII, which could easily become a gas chamber, and the building of a “duck pond” in ravelin No. XV, which could be easily changed into the area where all of the camp’s inmates could be shot by machine -guns, burned by flame – throwers or drowned by a gush of water from the Oh e river. However, the leadership of the Reich had different plans for Terezin.

According to Wikipedia, “A ravelin is a triangular fortification or detached outwork, located in front of the innerworks of a fortress (the curtain walls and bastions). Originally called a demi-lune, after the lunette, the ravelin is placed outside a castle and opposite a fortification curtain.”

Theresienstadt was originally built as a military fort; it was surrounded by a dry moat and had five bastions which stuck out.

Theresienstadt was an old military fort

Dry moat at Theresienstadt

Maybe those stupid Nazis were planning to drown the Jews at Theresienstadt by flooding the moat with water.  They were desperate to kill all the Jews in the last days of the war, and when they were incapable of finishing the gas chamber in time, they decided on this outrageous plan.  Red Cross workers were already there, taking care of the prisoners who had typhus.

All American children should spend several months learning about the Nazi plan to drown the prisoners at Theresienstadt.  Forget American history, this is more important.

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.

Holocaust survivor was a prisoner in four “death camps” and only survived because Mauthausen was “out of killer gas.”

You can read the story of Holocaust survivor Helga Weiss in full here. Helga has just published the journal that she kept for four years while she was imprisoned in several Nazi concentration camps.

Helga was born in 1929 and her story parallels that of Anne Frank, who was also born in 1929, except that Helga’s family did not go into hiding.  Helga was sent to Theresienstadt, now known as Terezin, where Anne Frank’s  family would have been sent, had they not gone into hiding.

This quote from the news article about Helga caught my attention:

Then in April 1945 they were moved by rail to Mauthausen in Austria. It took 16 days – so long the camp was out of killer gas.

After being sent to Theresienstadt, where she stayed in the children’s barracks for several years, Helga was sent with her mother to Auschwitz, and from there to Freiberg, which was a sub-camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. In the last days of the war, the Flossenbürg camp was evacuated and some of the prisoners were sent to the Mauthausen camp in Austria.

Helga was lucky.  She survived because the Mauthausen gas chamber was out of “killer gas” in April 1945. But is this true?  Not according to the Mauthausen Memorial Site.  The photo below shows a sign that was inside the gas chamber in May 2003 when I took the photo.

Sign inside the Mauthausen gas chamber

The sign, shown in the photo above, indicates that the gas chamber at Mauthausen was in operation until April 29, 1945. The sign mentions that Cyclon B gas (the killer gas) was being used until April 29, 1945.

The plaque shown in the photo above was in the gas chamber in May 2003. In April 1989, there was a different sign with slightly different wording.

The English version of the sign in 1989 was as follows:

The gas chamber was camouflaged as a bathroom by sham showers and waterpipes. Cyclone B gas was sucked in and exchanged through a shaft (situated in the corner on the right) from the operating room into the gas chamber. The gas-conduit was removed shortly before liberation on April 4th, 1945.

Note that, in 1989, the date given for the removal of the gassing apparatus was April 4, 1945. In May 2003, the sign in the gas chamber gave the date of removal as April 29, 1945.  So Helga was brought to Mauthausen after April 4, 1945 and there was no gas chamber at that time.  The sign had to be changed because Ludwig Haider was gassed AFTER April 4, 1945.

The photo below shows a memorial plaque for Ludwig Haider who was gassed on April 23, 1945, less than two weeks before the camp was liberated on May 5, 1945. At the time that Ludwig Haider was gassed, a Red Cross representative was in the camp and selected prisoners were being evacuated to neutral countries, but in spite of this, the gassing continued right up to the end.

Memorial for Ludwig Haider who was gassed at Mauthausen on April 23, 1945

So it seems that the Nazis had NOT run out of “killer gas” at Mauthausen.  But what about Auschwitz?  Helga was sent from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz; why wasn’t she gassed at Auschwitz?

This quote, from the news article about Helga Weiss, tells about an incident where children at Auschwitz, who were being taken to the gas chamber, escaped and ran into Helga’s barracks:

The teenager [Helga]  could hear the guards’ hobnail boots heading towards the hut [barracks] and froze in terror.

She wrote in her diary: “They’re coming! They saw the children running to us! They’ll shoot all of us. It’s the end!”

She says: “I hugged Mum and started to pray, ‘God, if I must die, let Mum and me die together. Don’t leave me alone here.

“Although I don’t want to die – let Mum and me survive’.”

And they did. From Auschwitz they were sent to Freiberg [sub-camp of Flossenbürg] in Germany as slave labour.

So Helga was writing in her journal at the exact time that a group of children were being taken to the Auschwitz gas chamber?  What did the guards say when they burst in and found Helga recording this event in her journal?  “Oh, excuse us; we didn’t mean to interrupt your writing. Carry on; we will come back another day to take the children to the gas chamber.”

By this time, Helga was exempt from the Auschwitz gas chamber because she was 15 years old.  Anne Frank was not gassed at Auschwitz because she was over 15 years old.  Anne was sent on to Bergen-Belsen.  Helga was also sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she survived the typhus epidemic, only to be sent to Mauthausen to be gassed in the last days of the war, even though she was over 15 at that point.

What?  You don’t believe that there was a gas chamber at Mauthausen? Oh, ye of little faith.  I have two pages of gas chamber testimony on my website, starting here. I will have to add Helga’s testimony to the list.

New film by Claude Lanzmann will feature Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish Elder at Theresienstadt

On May 20, 2012, I blogged about Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein, whose son, Dr. Wolf Murmelstein, wrote an essay about his father, entitled “The Last Unrighteous” — The Witness never heard.  A new movie about Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein by Claude Lanzmann, which will be released soon, will be entitled Last of the Unjust.

This quote is from an article about the film in today’s news:

Elsa Keslassy reports in Variety that Claude Lanzmann’s new film has a title—“Last of the Unjust”—and a lead producer, the new French company Synecdoche. The film, as I mentioned in my review of Lanzmann’s extraordinary autobiography, “The Patagonian Hare,” will be about Theresienstadt. According to Keslassy, it will “put a spotlight on Benjamin Murmelstein, an Austrian Jew who was appointed by Adolf Eichmann as head of the Jewish Council of Elders and rule over Theresienstadt.” Lanzmann will be filming, she says, in Israel, Austria, Poland, Czech Republic, and Italy.

Claude Lanzmann is the film maker who created Shoah, a film which features the testimony of numerous Holocaust survivors.  According to the news article, Lanzmann interviewed Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein in 1975, over the course of several days.  These were the most extensive interviews that Lanzmann did, but none of them were included in the completed film.  Why not?  I don’t know, but possibly, it is because Dr. Murmelstein was accused, but not convicted, of collaborating with the Nazis.

This part of the news article, which you can read in full here, caught my attention:

Among the heroes of “Shoah” (and “heroes” is just the right word; the movie has villains, too) are Filip Müller, who, as part of a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, took part in getting people into gas chambers and getting corpses out of them; and Abraham Bomba, one of the barbers in Treblinka, who cut the hair of Jews who were about to be murdered in gas chambers.

Filip Müller — a hero of the Holocaust?  I don’t think so.  I was very critical of Filip Müller in a blog post which you can read here.  I quoted the testimony of Abraham Bomba on my web site here.  Both Müller and Bomba are favorite targets of Holocaust revisionists because their outrageous claims tend to disprove the Holocaust.

In my humble opinion, I believe that the testimony of Dr. Murmelstein also tends to disprove the Holocaust.  I think that is why his original testimony for Shoah in 1975 ended up on the cutting room floor.

You can read an essay about Theresienstadt, written by Dr. Wolf Murmelstein, on my website here.  You can read the testimony by a child survivor of Theresienstadt here.

The three trains that left Bergen-Belsen in April 1945….were they bound for an extermination camp?

This morning I read yet another news story here about Marion Blumenthal Lazan who gave a talk to middle school students in which she said that, in the last days of World War II, she was put on one of the three trains sent from Bergen-Belsen to an extermination camp.

I previously blogged about Marion’s story here.  In that talk to students, Marion was more explicit: she said that the train was taking the prisoners to the gas chamber.

I decided to do a little research and found this article about the Oppenheimer family members who were on “The Last Train from Belsen.”  But before getting to their story, I want to quote this sentence from the article about Marion’s latest talk to students:

[Marion's] family was among 2,500 Jews put on a train headed for an extermination camp. What should have been a 10-hour journey took two weeks as the Nazis tried to evade the allies.

This quote is from the article about the Oppenheimer family:

Every Holocaust survivor has a different story. This is certainly true for the three Oppenheimer children, Eve, Rudi and Paul, who were fortunate to survive for five years under the Nazis in Holland, and in the camps of Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen, and who finished up on ‘The Last Train from Belsen.”

All three of the trains that left Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 were on their way to the Theresienstadt camp, which was turned over to the Red Cross in the final days of the war.

This quote from the story of the Oppenheimer children tells why the prisoners were taken to Theresientstadt:

At this time, 600 people were dying in Belsen every day, including Anne Frank and her sister Margot in another section of the camp. But we realized that the Allies were winning the war. Eventually we could hear the Allied guns approaching Belsen and we looked forward to our liberation and freedom. But there was another ordeal in store for us because the Germans wanted to keep the “Exchange Jews” as hostages and the Star Camp was evacuated.

All the inmates were marched to the nearby railway loading ramp and we boarded the third of three trains. The other two trains departed; the first one was liberated by the American army within just a few days, the second one may have reached Theresienstadt, the perceived destination of all three trains.

Did Theresienstadt have a gas chamber?  Of course!  Every concentration camp had a Gaskammer.  You can read about the Theresienstadt gas chamber on this page of my website.  (Scroll down to the part about the Litomerice gate if you don’t want to read the whole page.)

How Adolf Eichmann saved the Danish Jews

Yesterday, I blogged about a 5th grade class that learned about the fate of the Danish Jews in World War II from a Holocaust survivor. I blogged about this because I was very surprised that a 5th grade teacher would introduce this subject to a class of 10-year-olds. The  true story of what happened to the Danish Jews disagrees with the official history of the Holocaust:  In order not to be branded a Holocaust denier, one must believe that “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe” was the systematic plan to kill all the Jews in Europe, which later became known as the “genocide” of the Jews.  How can it be genocide when the Jews in one country in Europe were not killed?  That must be why these unsuspecting 10-year-old children were told, by an eyewitness Holocaust survivor, that a Danish Jew was gassed at Auschwitz.

The real story is that none of the Jews in Denmark were deliberately killed and none were sent to Auschwitz to be exterminated. The most amazing thing about the Danish Jews is that Adolf Eichmann, the so-called “mastermind” of the Holocaust, was involved in saving them from the gas chambers!  Did Eichmann get any thanks for this?  No, after he was tried and convicted, by an Israeli court, of  Crimes against Humanity, Eichmann was hanged.

A few years ago, I purchased a book entitled The Miracle in Denmark, The Rescue of the Jews by Christian Ejlers.  On page 46 of the book is a photo of Adolf Eichmann in his SS uniform.  The caption reads:  “SS-Obersturmführer Adolf Eichmann (1906 – 1962) was the man behind the German genocide of six million Jews, the Roma people, and homosexuals in Europe.”

This quote is from page 47 of the book The Miracle in Denmark:

Adolf Eichmann arrived in Copenhagen (Denmark) on November 2, 1943.  Like (Werner) Best, he was an SS officer. He was head of the department of the Reichsichershauptamt (RSHA) that was entrusted with carrying out Hitler’s policies against Jews: having as many of them as possible annihilated.

[Werner Best was the German Reich Commissioner in occupied Denmark; he was the top civil authority in Denmark from 1942 to May 5, 1945.]

We do not know for certain the real reason why this mass murderer came to Copenhagen.  Some believe that his job was to try to find out why the action against the Jews had been a fiasco — seen from the Germans’ point of view.  Who was responsible?  Others believe that he came to support (Werner) Best in the internal power struggle that had begun among the SS, the German foreign Ministry, and the Wehrmacht.  [...]  No matter what the explanation, Best and Eichmann made an agreement at Hotel D’Angleterre on November 2, 1943.  This agreement was sent as a telegram to Berlin on November 3, 1943.  Its contents were as follows:

1.  Jews over 60 will no longer be arrested and deported.
2.  The deported half-Jews and Jews married to non-Jews will be released and sent back to Denmark.
3. All Jews who had been deported from Denmark will remain in Theresienstadt and within a reasonable length of time will be visited by representatives of the Danish authorities and the Danish Red Cross.   [...]
The last point in the telegram meant that no Jews from Denmark — including those who were not Danish citizens — were sent to Auschwitz or other extermination camps.

Chapter 4 in the book The Miracle in Denmark is entitled “Deportation.”  This quote is at the beginning of the chapter:  “Why did Adolf Eichmann and Werner Best ensure that 481 Jews in Theresienstadt were not sent to the extermination camps.” 

According to the book, tour guides at Theresienstadt tell visitors that “the Danish Jews were saved because they were protected by the Danish king.”  However, the author of the book explains that it was not King Christian X who saved the Danish Jews. The Danish Jews were sent to Theresienstadt in October 1943; the Danish government had resigned on August 29, 1943, so the Danish king did not have the authority to save the Jews.   No, it was Werner Best and Adolf Eichmann, both German SS officers, who decided that the Danish Jews would be sent to Theresienstadt and that they would not be transported to Auschwitz.

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.

Holocaust survivor was born in Mauthausen concentration camp

Eva Nathan Clarke was born in the Mauthausen concentration camp on April 29, 1945, the day that her mother, Anka Nathan Bergman, arrived as a prisoner on a train from a labor camp in Freiberg, near Dresden, Germany. Her father, Bernd Nathan, had been shot in Auschwitz on January 18, 1945, the same day that 60,000 prisoners were marched out of the camp and taken to camps in Germany and Austria. Eva now lives in Cambridge, England and works for the Holocaust Educational Trust. She tells her story to students in order to remember and commemorate all those who died, but also to teach the lessons of the Holocaust.

Westerbork camp is being rebuilt

Westerbork was a transit camp for Jews in the Netherlands; this is the camp where Anne Frank and her family were sent in August 1944 after someone betrayed them to the Gestapo. Over 400,000 people visit the site of the former camp every year, although there is virtually nothing there.  According to recent news reports, the camp is being rebuilt for the benefit of tourists.

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.