Theresienstadt

Theresienstadt was unlike any other site in the Nazi camp system: a walled eighteenth-century garrison town in the Czech lands, about 32 miles north of Prague, that the Nazis turned in November 1941 into a ghetto serving several purposes at once. It was a transit ghetto through which Czech Jews were funneled toward camps in the east, an 'old-age ghetto' where elderly and prominent German and Austrian Jews were sent under the cynical promise of a 'spa town,' and, in 1944, a propaganda stage, beautified and filmed to deceive an International Red Cross delegation into believing conditions were humane. Behind the facade it was deadly: about 34,000 people died within its walls, and the great majority of the roughly 140,000 Jews who passed through were deported onward to their deaths. Yet the ghetto also became a remarkable center of clandestine cultural life, where imprisoned composers, artists, writers, and children produced music, paintings, and poetry. The SS fled in early May 1945, the Red Cross assumed administration, and Soviet forces entered on 9 May 1945.