Terezin: "Model" Concentration Camp and Death Camp for "Mosaic" Christians

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. 

Walking My Bike in a Grocery Store

 

Bike path??

Yesterday I stopped at the grocery store on the way home from the afternoon ride. I was on my racing bike so I did not have a lock and was not going to leave a bike with $2,000 wheels outside a store, so I walked my bike through the store.

As I walked to the back, a woman said, "I've never seen that before."

I remembered I needed coffee cream so I walked over to the dairy section. After I picked up the carton, a man in his mid-40s looking at the milk display said, "You look like someone who stayed trim later in.....as you got older. What kind of milk do you drink? I could slim down some. Do you drink almond milk?"

When he took a breath I said, "I drink Lactaid. I tried almond milk. I don't like it. But you could try it."

He thanked me and said he should exercise more. I waved and clicked away (bike cleats) toward the cash register.

Only once did I have someone tell me I could not walk my bike in a grocery store. I pointed out that my bike took up less space than a shopping cart.

Have you ever walked a bike through a store?

Last Day of the Trip was a Beautiful Day in Paris

Jardin Luxembourg, the garden ringed by statues of every queen of France 

After two weeks of traveling across central Europe visiting four concentration camps, I arranged my trip so I would spend the last day in Paris. The day turned out even better than I could have hoped. 

First, I woke for breakfast at 9am then afterward went back to bed. I finally got up at noon and on the train to the area of Saint Michel, Luxembourg and the Pantheon. All my clothes, which isn’t much, were dirty, so I walked form the Seine in brilliant sun up the hill toward the Pantheon. I stopped on the way to eat Sushi then walked over to Boulevard Saint Michel. 

When I arrived in Paris two weeks earlier the five-floor bookstore Gibert was closed—I thought forever. 

Gibert librairie

But the doors were open and I went inside, to every floor. 

I bought a little book of Greek grammar and Leonard Cohen’s “Book of Mercy.”

I walked further up the hill and started washing my clothes. I went back to the laundromat where I met an Australian couple who were in France for the 24 Hours of Lemans. But this time I met no one. Only one other machine had clothes in it while I was there. With the clothes washing I walked further up the hill and had cappuccino at Columbus Café, opposite Jardin Luxembourg. 

Next I walked around the corner to Red Wheelbarrow bookstore and visited there. After folding my clothes, I walked around Luxembourg for an hour. 

Then I had an early dinner at Au Pere Louis, one of my favorite restaurants in Paris. I walked more and finally went back to the hotel. Following two weeks of shared seeing the worst of humanity, it was good to spend the last day in civilization at its best.

Visiting Auschwitz Again It Is Even More Horrible

 

Auschwitz I

The second death camp I visited on this trip was the Auschwitz concentration camp. I was here in 2017. It was the first death camp I had ever visited. In fact, before that Auschwitz visit, I had never been to a Holocaust museum. 

The Nazi lie at the gate of every death camp

On this second visit I was more aware of the terrible scale of the slaughter and of the
camp itself. Auschwitz began as a Polish army camp taken over by the Nazis shortly after their victory in 1939. The camp is on the edge of the small city of Oswiecim. 

The little Polish town of Oswiecim became the center of death as Auschwitz-Birkenau

To Nazis expanded the camp by using slave labor to add second stories to existing barracks and added other buildings. The brick construction in Auschwitz is still solid today, unlike in many camps where wooden and hastily built brick buildings have long since fallen or crumbled. As Auschwitz became the center of Nazi genocide, the huge Birkenau camp was built two kilometers away. Acres of barracks and workshops cover a large field just outside the town of Oswiecim. 

The vast facility at Birkenau was where most Jews were murdered

In between acres of barracks is the rail siding where Jews were unloaded from box cars and separated to either work as slaves or be immediately killed by gas. Cliff and I walked for hours between and in the two camps trying to take in the full scale of place where more than million Jews were murdered.

Life or immediate death at the whim of a malignant Nazi

Entrepreneurs of Violence: Money and Hate Drove SS Innovations in Horror

 

Jewish slave labor in the Flossenburg quarry

The Flossenburg concentration camp was a working quarry site before it became a death camp. When the SS took over operations in the late 1930s prisoners became free slave labor to deliver quarry stones to the Nazi war effort. Later in the war, when there was little demand for stone and much need for Messerschmidt fighter planes, the underground halls in rural Bavaria became manufacturing sites for airplane parts. Innovations by the SS and Gestapo made the horrors of the Holocaust far worse than they might have been. 

In the mid 1930s, Hitler had vague plans to send Jews to Siberia once he conquered Russia or to Madagascar. The possibility of killing all the Jews in Nazi-controlled territories became possible as the SS developed more efficient methods of mass murder. At the beginning of the war Jews were killed primarily by shooting. Tens of thousands of German police and soldiers murdered Jews across Eastern Europe by shooting them over slaughter pits such as those in Kiev and Lviv in what is now Ukraine. 

Camps such as Auschwtiz and Treblinka began mass murder by gas only in the 1940s. Then rather than millions of individual murders, Jews were killed by the thousands and cremated. The death camps led to the particular horror created by Adolph Eichmann—putting three million Jews in rail cars and shipping them to their death, primarily in Poland. 

Less than a year before the war ended, hundreds of thousands of Jews were stuffed in rail cars and murdered on arrival or after being used as slave labor. As the war neared its end, slave labor lost its value and death became the sole business of the camps. The final spasms of slaughter were the worst of all. 

The crematorium at Flossenburg

At Flossenburg and Auschwitz, those who survived slave labor were marched west ahead of the Soviet Army. Tens of thousands of prisoners starved and froze to death and were buried along the roads during the cruel winter of 1945.

A diorama made by a camp survivor

Surviving War and Terror: Sister Hildegard

Sister Hildegard in her apartment

On my second day in Dresden, I met Sister Hildegard.  She is 84 and has lived in Dresden all of her long life.  During that life her world has changed dramatically again and again.

She was born in 1937, one of four children of German parents. Her father was a member of the Nazi party. Her mother had left the Church so there was no religion in her early life.  The war began in 1939 when Hildegard was two and soon her father left to serve in the army.  At the beginning of 1943 her father was reported "missing presumed dead" in the Battle of Stalingrad.  

Also in 1943, Allied bombing of Germany began in earnest.  Hildegard and her siblings went to the country for school.  In February 1945 the beautiful city of Dresden was smashed and burned in consecutive nights of Royal Air Force fire bombing raids.  

The war ended in May of 1945, with more trouble ahead.  Dresden was in the Soviet occupation zone so the communist East German government was in charge.  When Hildegard turned 14 years old in 1953 she had to find a job. She could not continue her education. The problem was not that her father was a Nazi, it was that her parents were educated. Preference for education under the communists went to the children of workers. 

Hildegard found work at a Catholic hospital in Dresden. At first she cleaned bricks to help in rebuilding the hospital which was nearly completely destroyed in the fire bombing of 1945.  She eventually trained as a nurse and decided to become a sister in the order of nuns that work in the hospital.  Her mother returned to faith in 1947 and would become part of the Land of Kanaan sisterhood in Darmstadt.  

Until 1961, Hildegard and her family could cross back and forth between East and West Germany with little difficulty.  But the Berlin Crisis in 1961 led to a fully closed border.  Hildegard was in Dresden. Her mother was in Darmstadt and it would be many years before they were reunited.  

With the communists in full control, Hildegard took charge of the OB GYN section of the hospital from 1967 to 1997.  She worked under increasingly harsh control by the communists then suddenly in 1990 they were gone.  One of the things that made life bearable under the communists was everyone in her community and in other faith communities were clear that the danger was the communists. The communists had spies everywhere.  As devout Catholics the nuns were always under suspicion.

But believers were all united in opposition to the communists.  When communism fell, the freedom that followed led to competition and the end of opposition to a single enemy and the unity that went with it.

Sisters who had lived through the Nazi era said life then was very different. During that time, some of the sisters were devoted Nazis and some were ardently against the Nazis.  The challenge was to keep the community together when the worst strife was within.  Hildegard said after the war, the sisters who were devoted Nazis either repented or left the order.  The purge was rapid. 

My friend Cliff and I visited Sister Hildegard in her room in the hospital residential area for nuns and women in long-term care.  She speaks no English. I speak no German. Cliff and Hildegard talked and every ten minutes of so, Cliff would give me a summary of what he learned. I asked questions in these intervals. 

Cliff (Bruder Timotheus) and Sister Hildegard

Part of her story was in a speech she gave in 2015 explaining the many radical changes she lived through.  She and Cliff reviewed the speech which was written in neat handwriting while I watched and wished I had learned German.  She does not have a computer or a phone--except the phone with a wire on her desk. 

Sister Hildegard has retired from nursing but still a leader in her community. We ate lunch in the hospital cafeteria and sat at her table.  As the guest, I got to sit in her chair and eat some very good goulash and mashed potatoes.  On the walk to and from the cafeteria she greeted everyone we met with a smile.  She is in every way a gracious host.

Fun with Five Euro Notes

 

This morning we visited the Terezin concentration camp.  We parked in the designated lot.  When it was time to leave, the automatic parking exit would only accept Czech Koruna--no Euros, no credit card.  

Beside the parking lot was a vendor selling drinks and ice cream.  I asked her about changing Euros.  She looked a little sad. So I said "Zwei eis und kleingeld in koruna." She smiled at that. Probably as much at my bad German as with not having to be a money changer.  I got 45 koruna in change. The parking cost 30 koruna ($1.50) so Cliff and I were on our way with paid parking and ice cream cones.

Late in the afternoon we got burgers in a burger restaurant in Old City Dresden.  The woman who waited on us was a very happy person.  We made a couple of jokes with her.  When we were ready to leave she came to the table and said, "You would like to pay?"  

I said, "We would like to pay. In fact we would love to pay you."  She laughed out loud. I then said I hoped she would be rich and famous, make millions of Euros and become the most successful restaurant owner in the world. She and Cliff were both laughing. American exaggeration sounds very strange in Dresden.  

Cliff asked if my drink was really alcohol free. She said they had put vodka in my drink. 

She gave us the change. I gave her back a five-Euro note and said it was the start of her first million.