April 10: Terezin

We spent the full touring day today at Terezin, an 18th century Habsburg fortress built toward the border with Germany in order to protect against potential invasion.

At Terezin, there was considerable courage shown in the face of Nazi cruelty.  One light that shined bright was Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, an artist who supervised the children's house there.  Her students created thousands of pieces of art work, and we can see many of these pieces in the collection "I Never Saw Another Butterfly."  This is a picture of a children's house at Terezin:

There was no train station right next to Terezin, and so the Nazis forced the Jews to build one.  Before they built this station, deportees would walk some 5k after their terrible deportation from home.  This photo shows the remains of the train station-siding the Jews built:

In Terezin, one burial ground for Jews who died there contains some 9,000 burials.  A stone menorah stands at the site.

While there were no gas chambers at Terezin, there was a crematorium that the Nazis used when in-ground burial was no longer possible.  They threw ashes of thousands of Jews into the nearby river when the Red Cross was on its way.  At the memorial lights inside the crematorium we recited the Kaddish.

One of the crematorium ovens, here with a 'shin' comprised of three red flowers.  The 'shin', as on the mezuzah, represents the way we invoke God's Presence into the world.

The ashes of one of our people, May he rest in peace and may his memory be for a blessing.

One of the hidden, secret synagogues in Terezin with Holocaust survivor Abe Bowski standing at the front of the room in front of the Hebrew inscription, "And our eyes will witness Your [God's] compassionate return to Zion." -- a message of hope and redemption.

On our way out of Terezin, one last look at the heavily fortified walls of this tightly guarded fortress.  Only 3 men were known to have escaped Terezin during the Holocaust years.  The small fortress, located across from the larger ghetto compound, was a prison. Here is the story of the escape:

Of the several dozen attempted escapes from the fortress, only one was successful. On Saint Nicholas Day, December 6, 1944, Josef Mattas, Miloš Ešner and František Maršík escaped while the guards were celebrating. They climbed down a rope into the moat and through a gap in a bulwark. They hid there until the end of the war.

We will be waking up at the early hour of 230am to catch flights that will take us over the border to Krakow in Poland.