Some thoughts after our visit to Terezin

Hidden synagogue walls at Terezin

Sarah Stein
April 6, 2008

Thoughts on visit to Terezin April 2:

It was so clear as we stood in the Terezin rooms with walls covered by Jewish art that the driving motive of the Nazis was to kill God--because God was infinitely, abundantly, overflowingly present in the photos of the Jewish prisoners and in their efforts to express what they saw and experienced through their remarkable creative outpouring in the face of death. They were enlisted as draftsmen for the Nazi propaganda machine in Terezin. They were given pencils, paints, paper, and they produced—art. Remarkable drawings, watercolors, portraits—scenes of the camps, renderings of dead bodies in rows, but also of the life in the camp before each was assigned to death in Auschwitz. They drew Jewish stars and painstakingly printed out Torah passages on the walls of a small shed and created a hidden synagogue where they continued to worship and pray.

The Jews were rounded up Prague, in other parts of Czechoslovakia and from other neighboring countries. They were told to pack only one suitcase—so what would they bring? What was most precious to them, what was most valuable. Some things would be of personal significance, photos, letters, books, a Bible. But other items would have real material value. So the Nazis created an extraordinarily economical and efficient system: they got the Jews to sort through and bring to them their material wealth—and the Nazis would steal it and then murder them.

We rode in a chartered bus to Terezin, through the countryside from Prague. We got to the garrison town, which the Nazis had emptied of the Czechs who’d been living there. All of the buildings were then filled with Jews, and the Gestapo sent to run the camp. Our tour arrived at the Registration building. We were told to leave our personal belongings on our chartered bus as we toured the memorial. They would be safe, we were told. Just as the Jews had been told in 1942 when they arrived at Terezin—come this way, leave your belongings, they’ll be safe. We were allowed to get back on our bus and go back. They were not.

Part of the unfathomable evil of the Nazis was the elaborate artifices they put in place. The Red Cross visit to inspect the concentration camps in 1944 was announced 6 months in advance. The Nazis created an elaborate display of wellbeing—filmed footage of smiling children, people attending a concert, kids playing in a playground that they entered only the day of the filming and never again. And, the Red Cross walked away satisfied--leaving unspeakable horror to continue.

Yet even so, the life in those Jews reverberates in that town, in those buildings God’s presence was palpable—in the art the Jews created, in the holiness of the hidden synagogue the prisoners created in a basement room, painstakingly writing the Hebrew letters of a verse on the walls, in the terrible pain, suffering, and sorrow of those souls permeating that camp. 155,000 Jews went through Terezin, 35000 of whom died there of typhus, starvation, or torture—and most of the rest of whom were sent on to execution in Auschwitz.

But God was present in each of them and suffered their deaths with them. And lived—lives--through what they created, and in all of us who came back.