Terezín commemorates first Jewish transport anniversary

Prague, Nov 22 (CTK) - Some 155,000 Jews from Bohemia, Moravia and elsewhere in Europe gradually went through the wartime Jewish ghetto whose establishment started in Terezin (Theresienstadt), north Bohemia, 70 years ago.

Of the ghetto inmates, 118,000 did not survive the war.

The first transport with a "building commando" arrived in the planned Terezin ghetto on November 24, 1941.

During the ghetto's 3.5-year existence, until May 1945, about 35,000 inmates died there and further 83,000 perished after being deported from Terezin to extermination and labour camps and within death marches at the close of the war.

In the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Holocaust started after the arrival of deputy Reichsprotector Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in September 1941.

On October 10, a meeting in Prague decided on the deportation of a part of Czech Jews to Lodz, Poland, with the first transport leaving on October 16.

Terezin was chosen as a place to concentrate most Jews from the Protectorate.

Since June 1940, the Small Fortress of Terezin, a town built as a fortification against the Prussian threat in 1780-91, had served as a the Prague Gestapo's prison. The inmates were mainly Czechoslovak political prisoners and anti-Nazi resistance members.

About 32,000 people ended in the Small Fortress until the war's end, 2,600 of whom perished there and further thousands died after being deported from Terezin.

The Jewish Ghetto in the Main Fortress was even a more horrific chapter of Terezin's wartime history.

The "building commando" of 342 Jewish men was brought to Terezin on November 24, 1941. Their task was to prepare more buildings for further transports that started arriving in the nascent ghetto from November 30.

The people included in the transports were summoned by the authorities and had to gather at special places in bigger Czech towns. Before, they had to give up their property and keep 50 kg of luggage at the most. In the beginning, Jewish families could keep together, but later they were split and men, women and children accommodated separately.

The transports arrived at the railway station in Bohusovice nad Ohri, some 2.5 km away from Terezin, and then the deportees walked to Terezin.

A total of 7,350 Jews from the Protectorate were deported to the Terezin ghetto in the first month.

At the Wannsee conference in January 1942 the Nazis decided to deport also mainly old Jews from elsewhere in Europe to Terezin. There were 58,000 inmates in the ghetto in September 1942.

Before, in January 1942, transports heading from the ghetto eastwards started. The last of the 63 death transports left in October 1944. Over 87,000 people were deported to extermination and concentration camps, of whom only 3,800 lived to see the war's end. A half of the transports leaving the ghetto had the Oswiecim-Brzezinka (Auschwitz-Birkenau) extermination camp as their destination.

A total of 140,000 Jews, designed as victims of "the final solution to the Jewish question," were deported to the Terezin ghetto from November 1941 to April 1945.

From April 20 and May 6, 1945, the inmates were joined by over 15,000 people from "evacuation transports" that brought in Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners from various concentration camps.

A total of some 155,000 people, including 75,000 from Bohemia and Moravia, 40,000 from Germany, 15,000 from Austria and others from Slovakia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Denmark and other Nazi-occupied countries, went through the Terezin ghetto.

About 35,000 inmates died there of distress, hunger and horrific accommodation and hygienic conditions.

Three Nazi officers were the ghetto's commanders one after another - Siegfried Seidl, Anton Burger and Karl Rahm (only Seidl and Rahm were convicted after the war).

Renowned personalities among the ghetto inmates, some of whom went through it in childhood, were writers Karel Polacek, Arnost Lustig, Norbert Fryd and Ivan Klima, conductor Karel Ancerl, opera singer Karel Berman, composers Hans Krasa, Viktor Ullmann and Pavel Haas, film director Dusan Klein, philosopher Karel Kosik, politician Egon Lansky, photographer Jan Saudek and his twin brother Kaja, a popular illustrator, Austrian writer Hans Guenter Adler and Rabbi Richard Feder.

Those who perished in the ghetto include entrepreneur Emil Kolben, pre-war minister for the Czechoslovak German Social Democrats Ludwig Czech, a sister of Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud, father of present Czech Chief Rabbi Karol Sidon and grandfather of Czech-born former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright.

The Red Army liberated Terezin in the night to May 9, 1945. At the end of the war, Terezin was hit by a typhoid fever epidemic, which claimed over 1000 lives of inmates as well as the medical staff.