The ironic lie at the gate of many concentration camps, including Terezin
Two weeks ago I visited the Terezin concentration camp west of Prague in the Czech Republic. Terezin is variously classed as a ghetto or a concentration camp. Tens of thousands died in the camp both from execution and disease, but it was not an extermination camp with gas chambers. 
Dozens of people slept in these bunks
Terezin was used a "model" camp. It was the camp the Red Cross was allowed to visit in February 1944 to show that the camps were not as bad as the reports coming out as the Nazi Army retreated. The Nazis gave the Jews in the camp some autonomy. Many Jewish children were sent to Terezin and not made into slave laborers or murdered, at least for a while.
A memorial to Jews tortured and murdered in the small fortress at Terezin
Another group sent to Terzin was professing German Christians who had even one Jewish great-grandparent. Christians with Jewish backgrounds were removed from Church leadership in 1933. All Jewish or "Mosaic" Christians were expelled from Churches in 1935. Many were sent there to be enslaved and eventually murdered at Terezin or sent to Auschwitz to be enslaved or murdered.
A memorial near the fortress wall that served as an execution site
After my first visit to Auschwitz in 2017, I began to see the area controlled by the Nazis, between the Pyrenees and the Ural mountains, as a place where 400 million people with a Christian identity lived and possibly one in a thousand acted like Jesus. All those Christians were living normal lives until the Nazis took over, then the trial came and 999 of 1,000 murdered and dispossessed their Jewish neighbors or averted their eyes.
The history of Terezin and the attempt to make it a "model" camp makes clear that even the worst of the Nazis knew that their actions were evil.
No comments:
Post a Comment