Terezín and the Vltava at Dusk
An hour north of Prague, the town of Terezín—called Theresienstadt in German—sits inside the walls of an 18th-century Habsburg military fortress, built under Emperor Joseph II between 1780 and 1790. The fortress was designed to defend against Prussian invasion. It was never attacked. In November 1941, the SS emptied the town of its Czech residents—approximately 3,500 people—and converted it into a ghetto. Between 1941 and 1945, over 150,000 Jews were sent here from Bohemia and Moravia, and from Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Roughly 33,000 died at Terezín itself, from disease, starvation, overcrowding, and direct violence. The large majority of the survivors were eventually transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the other extermination camps to the east.
Terezín’s particular significance in the history of the Holocaust is its role as a propaganda instrument. The site was used to deceive the outside world about what was happening to Europe’s Jews.
The Ghetto Museum
In June 1944, the International Committee of the Red Cross was invited to inspect Theresienstadt. In preparation for the visit, the SS deported approximately 7,500 residents to Auschwitz to reduce visible overcrowding. Buildings were painted. Gardens were planted. A café was opened. A children’s playground was installed. A bank was constructed—issuing Theresienstadt currency that could only be used inside the ghetto and could not be exchanged for anything real. Prisoners were instructed to appear to be engaged in leisure activities when the inspection passed through.
The Red Cross delegation spent several hours in the ghetto and filed a favorable report. The Nazi regime then capitalized on this by commissioning a propaganda film: Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt—“The Führer Gives a City to the Jews.” Directed under SS supervision, the film showed prisoners playing music, attending theater performances, participating in sports, and going about what appeared to be a comfortable, ordered life. The film was completed in September 1944. Most of the prisoners who appeared in it, including the director Kurt Gerron, were deported to Auschwitz and murdered after filming was done.
The Ghetto Museum documented this history with documents, photographs, and the artwork and testimonies that prisoners produced and preserved. Children’s drawings were displayed alongside deportation records. The children drew butterflies, houses, trees, gardens—the ordinary world they had come from and were trying to hold onto. Of approximately 15,000 children who passed through Terezín, fewer than 150 survived the war.
What the museum insisted on, and what stayed with me, was the cultural life that the prisoners created and maintained inside the ghetto despite everything. There were secret schools, organized lectures, theatrical performances, concerts. Composers—Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Hans Krása—wrote significant works at Terezín. Poets wrote in Czech and German. Artists drew what they saw, some hiding their most unflinching work in walls and attics for recovery after the war. The decision to create, to document, to insist on intellectual and artistic life inside a system designed to deny humanity—this was not an incidental feature of Terezín’s story. It was, for many prisoners, a form of resistance. The art survived because people hid it, knowing they might not survive themselves but that the record could.
The Vltava at Dusk
Back in Prague that evening, the group took a boat ride on the Vltava River. After a day at Terezín, the shift was almost too much to absorb. The river was calm. The bridges lit up one by one as the sky darkened. Prague Castle glowed gold on the hill above the curve of the river. Other boats passed, full of tourists with drinks in hand. Music carried across the water from somewhere.
I did not know how to hold the two things at once, and I did not try to resolve them. The Vltava was flowing through Prague when Terezín was operating, sixty kilometers to the north. The castle was there. The bridges were there. Life in Prague continued while 150,000 people were processed through a system designed to kill them or hold them until they could be killed elsewhere. That is not a comfortable thought. It is an accurate one. The world does not pause for atrocity while it is happening. It pauses afterward, in memory and in grief and in the various forms of memorialization that we build to hold what we cannot otherwise carry. But at the time, the river kept flowing.
