Prague, Jan 13 (CTK) – The Terezin Remembrance Books with Czech Holocaust victims are highlighted within the third Jachymova Street Open Days held in remembrance of a former Jewish school in Prague on January 13 and 14.
The school went down in history because from 1940 to 1942, it was the only educational institution in Prague that could be attended by Jewish pupils who were taught by Jewish teachers.
Since 2001, it has housed the Terezin Initiative and other organisations dealing with the Holocaust and Jewish culture.
In November 1995, the first volumes of the Terezin Remembrance Books with the first list of Holocaust victims from the Czech Lands were published.
The books were to record the names and fates of the inmates of the Terezin concentration camp and to preserve their memory, Tereza Stepkova, director of the Terezin Initiative Institute, told journalists yesteday.
Another two books, tracking down the fates of the Austrian and German Jews who were forced to live in Terezin, appeared in 2000 and 2005.
In all, the four volumes contain over 80,000 names.
“When the book appeared, we approached it with awe,” Dagmar Lieblova, an official of the Terezin Initiative, said.
She is a survivor of the Auschwitz (Oswiecim) annihilation camp.
Another Auschwitz survivor, Toman Brod, also worked on the book.
He said not all the data in the book were perhaps right, but given their tremendous volume, this was all but impossible.
“However, I am sure that 99 percent of them are correct,” Brod said.
Following the publication of the volumes, an online database of Holocaust victims was formed. It includes brief data on all Terezin ghetto inmates rounded up in the Czech Lands and of those who were sent to Terezin within the death marches in the last days of the war.
An internal system includes the records not only of the Holocaust victims, but also of the inmates who lived to see their liberation in May 1945.
After the occupation of the Czech Lands by Nazi Germany in March 1939, the Nazis selected the former garrison town Terezin as a ghetto for European Jews during the war.
Transports of Jews, first from the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia and then from other countries, such as Slovakia, Germany, Hungary, Austria and Denmark, arrived in the town. Over 155,000 Jews were gradually sent to Terezin in 1941-1945 and 117,000 of them died during the war.
