Concentration Camp, not Extermination Camp

90 Days In, 21 Days Out

Terezín. It's a concentration camp about half-an-hour by bus north of Prague, where the Duke Thanksgiving in Prague took us. The label of concentration camp is fairly significant--it really was a concentration, rather than an extermination, camp. That's not to say people weren't killed here. They were. But, it wasn't the kind of mass gas chamber deal like Auschwitz was.

Rather, Terezín was kind of like a mid-way point. Many Jews from Prague were shipped here in the early part of the 1940's, where they were eventually transported again to concentration/extermination camps further east. Auschwitz, Treblinka, etc. The Nazis used Terezín as a "show camp," so to speak. When the International Red Cross Committee (IRCC) came calling, they were showed Terezín as a model of all concentration camps. Terezín was played off as a place where Jews had got together, living happily.

Clearly, this was not the case. Now, if you go, you can see the rooms that were part of the Nazis' "beautification" process. We saw what was dubbed the "shaving room," a room lined with sinks on two walls and mirrors above them. The water in this room never worked. It was designed only as a facade to fool the IRCC. Another characteristic of Terezín was its utter overcrowding. At one point, it held almost 60,000 people. As another step in the beautification process, tons of Jews were sent in mass transports to extermination camps.

Because Terezín was not an extermination camp, the effect on visitors is, I'm sure, not anywhere near as powerful as those who see Auschwitz, which many people on this NYU in Prague program have gone to do. The closest thing to leaving that kind of effect, at Terezín, is probably the 500-meter long passageway we walked through. It takes about 10 minutes to walk from entrance to exit, and the entire way through it's a claustrophobia-inducing mass of wall pressing down. I say this from the viewpoint of someone who's bigger and taller than me. Someone six feet tall or above would not be able to walk upright in the tunnel.

The passage is the last thing Jews walked through, as the exit opens up onto a small clearing with a grassy knoll against the wall. The knoll acted as barrier that would absorb/bounce back bullets, and that was the extermination ground in the camp.

Terezín may not have been an extermination camp, per se, which makes it all the more terrifying to think about what happened further east.