The biggest realization that I’ve made is how separate you feel from history simply reading it in a book. I feel like the experiences I had when I was younger and had the pleasure of dressing up as pilgrims and revolutionaries and visiting relevant locations should have made me more aware of this fact. Perhaps it may have if there was more emotion behind the trips; if there was more significance placed on the past than how my costume compared to another girls. Still I think there is something different about visiting sites of the holocaust something visceral that both attracts and repels many people. Terezin wasn’t a death camp but instead a transfer point and waiting spot before going on to Auschwitz. It was a place where many famous Czech artists, composers, dancers, writers, minds were imprisoned because of the fact that they were Jewish. It was also a place glamorized in Nazi propaganda to convince people that the rumors of death camps and horrible treatment of Jews were simply untrue. Indeed a Red Cross team came and inspected the ghetto and found nothing wrong. The truth was so carefully concealed that “unauthorized correspondence” or trying to share the truth with people outside the ghetto was punishable by death or transportation to Auschwitz, it was almost the same thing.
This was one of several paintings by Bedrich Fritta that would have been considered “atrocity propaganda” by the Nazis who convicted him and three others of this offense and sentenced them and their families to be incarcerated in the Gestapo jail. After Fritta’s wife died in jail he was sent to Auschwitz where he died. There are so many stories like this it’s absolutely overwhelming. The saddest part is that regardless of how painful it was to hear none of this news is exactly surprising.
And while the horrors of the Holocaust were just that, inconceivable horrors, it often allows us to forget the tragedies that occur during war. We were also able to visit the memorial for the town of Lidice who the Nazis held responsible for the assassination Reinhard Heydrich. The Nazi’s shot and killed all the men, sent the majority of women to Ravensbruck concentration camp, separated the children – some to be raised in Germany others sent to Prague but the majority died at Chelmno extermination camp, and then burned the buildings and razed the entire town till there was nothing left.