Wish You Were Here

Visiting Terezin

Felix, our guide and a Holocaust survivor shows us around Terezin

Jewish Cemetery, putting rocks on a grave is a Jewish tradition

The cold dreary morning seemed to foretell how I was going to feel during our class trip to Terezin. Terezin is a town, but more importantly a former concentration camp and a Jewish ghetto, located about an hour away from Prague. The town had two fortresses that were constructed in the late 18th century and were designed to be a military fort, but this plan was never realized. Instead it was used to hold political prisoners. In the 1940s, Hitler’s regime used the smaller fortress of the two to house prisoners, and the larger fortress as a large Jewish ghetto. The ghetto housed nearly 150,000 Jewish people who lived in dire crammed conditions and was used as a transport to Auschwitz, where many met their fate of death. 35,000 people died in this town due to unsanitary conditions and starvation, and there were only about 18,000 survivors.

Our tour guide, Dr. Felix Kolmer was one of those survivors. Dr. Kolmer is a remarkable person as he survived both Terezin and Auschwitz, and today he is a professor in physics at Charles University. He led us through the prison and told us the horrific acts and would describe the dire conditions. Although he had endured all of this, Dr. Kolmer spoke to us in an unemotional descriptive way. It was amazing to me that after going through so much he could be able to tell his story and share it with us. During the tour I was so touched that is impossible to even describe it in words. All the inhumanity and suffering suddenly became very real to me.

The thing that struck me about the Jewish people who were living in Terezin was their ability to be creative through the harsh conditions. We visited a museum that displayed their artwork that vividly described how they felt. You could see the despair and feelings of futility and darkness through their drawings and poems. This artwork of course had to be hidden and was found after the end of the war, as Nazi propaganda portrayed Terezin as an ideal Jewish settlement. Today, Terezin is nearly a ghost town, and I don't blame anyone for not wanting to live here, as it's history makes it a very sad place. This day was very heavy for me and emotionally draining, but it is important to remember the pain that the Holocaust caused and the countless lives it destroyed.