Terezin
I hope you will forgive my break in the telling of my Amsterdam trip to discuss yesterday's day trip to Terezin, which is at the front of my mind and currently waiting eagerly to be written into this blog.
Yesterday morning, the nine students of CET Prague and our resident director Kim met to take a bus to Terezin, a small town established by Habsburg Emperor Joseph II as a fortress in case of a Prussian attack and most notoriously utilized by the Nazis as a transit ghetto/camp for European Jews and Gestapo prison for political dissidents (in the prison used in previous decades for prisoners of war, most famously the Serbian assassin of Archduke Ferdinand who is blamed with triggering the First World War).
Much like yesterday, today I feel very much at a loss of words to describe how I felt visiting this place. Our tour guide, a small Filipino lady who emigrated here and married a Czech man, rushed us past the various sites within the prison: the guard's office, the rooms where the prisoners checked in and left their belongings, the cell blocks, the showers, the tiny hospital, the fake shaving room built only to fool the Red Cross, the newer cell blocks built to house the overflow of Jewish political prisoners, the gallows, the shooting range (where Nazis, instead of practicing, shot people for real), and the fancy units that housed the Gestapo and their families.
As I usually do in such places, I grew quite introspective and quiet, refusing to speak unless spoken to directly and withdrawing into myself. I tried to reflect on how I felt upon first seeing the brightly painted words "Arbeit Macht Frei" on the arched entrance to the men's cell block. I have been to Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Museum and in both places I've felt both intensely sad and angry and cried very much. But this time it was different. I was neither distinctly sad nor distinctly angry, and I felt very far from tears. This inability to determine my emotion made me greatly confused.
I at last figured out how I felt- at least somewhat- as we walked from the prison to the city, also known as the Large Fortress (the prison is the Small Fortress). My thoughts kept turning to various anxieties and frustrations, thinking horrible things about other people and the world in general. That was when I realized that my reaction to Terezin was simply this: I was disurbed. And no matter how disturbed I felt being there, I know that it is only a tiny fraction of what the people who were sent there in the 1940s as prisoners can have felt.
Yesterday morning, the nine students of CET Prague and our resident director Kim met to take a bus to Terezin, a small town established by Habsburg Emperor Joseph II as a fortress in case of a Prussian attack and most notoriously utilized by the Nazis as a transit ghetto/camp for European Jews and Gestapo prison for political dissidents (in the prison used in previous decades for prisoners of war, most famously the Serbian assassin of Archduke Ferdinand who is blamed with triggering the First World War).
Much like yesterday, today I feel very much at a loss of words to describe how I felt visiting this place. Our tour guide, a small Filipino lady who emigrated here and married a Czech man, rushed us past the various sites within the prison: the guard's office, the rooms where the prisoners checked in and left their belongings, the cell blocks, the showers, the tiny hospital, the fake shaving room built only to fool the Red Cross, the newer cell blocks built to house the overflow of Jewish political prisoners, the gallows, the shooting range (where Nazis, instead of practicing, shot people for real), and the fancy units that housed the Gestapo and their families.
As I usually do in such places, I grew quite introspective and quiet, refusing to speak unless spoken to directly and withdrawing into myself. I tried to reflect on how I felt upon first seeing the brightly painted words "Arbeit Macht Frei" on the arched entrance to the men's cell block. I have been to Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Museum and in both places I've felt both intensely sad and angry and cried very much. But this time it was different. I was neither distinctly sad nor distinctly angry, and I felt very far from tears. This inability to determine my emotion made me greatly confused.
I at last figured out how I felt- at least somewhat- as we walked from the prison to the city, also known as the Large Fortress (the prison is the Small Fortress). My thoughts kept turning to various anxieties and frustrations, thinking horrible things about other people and the world in general. That was when I realized that my reaction to Terezin was simply this: I was disurbed. And no matter how disturbed I felt being there, I know that it is only a tiny fraction of what the people who were sent there in the 1940s as prisoners can have felt.
posted by Unknown at 4:16 PM
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