The Silences of Terezin

Sitting around 60 kilometres north-west of Prague, the former garrison town of Terezin - known as Theresienstadt in German - served as a WWII internment ghetto for European Jews, where some 155,000 were imprisoned from November 1941, around 35,000 people died and some 90,000 were deported to other camps to die. The Nazis largely left the prisoners to administrate the camp themselves while they awaited transports to the death camps and killing sites located in occupied Poland, Belarus and the Baltics.

This provides Hajkova with many inroads to investigate how inmate society organised itself, which she argues is empowering.

"Standard histories treat prisoners as stripped of agency, a grey powerless mass," Hajkova tells BIRN. "But people hate powerlessness. Look at the approach to the pandemic, for instance. In the face of the virus, we can do so little, but people have been very inventive in breaking lockdown restrictions. Terezin clearly had an imprint of Czech culture."

The original idea for studying Terezin's inmate society came, she continues, when visiting Israel and meeting survivors. They would talk not only of struggles, but also of playing football and chasing girls.

Yet the author soon discovered that such good times were largely reserved for the social elite, which inside Terezin meant young Czech men who had arrived early in the life of the camp and built much of it. At the opposite end of the hierarchy were elderly inmates who arrived later from Germany or Austria. To them, the Jewish self-administration gave the meanest rations and rudest lodgings.

A man pays his respect after a commemoration ceremony organized by the Fourth International Forum 'Let My People Live' during the International Holocaust Remembrance Day at...