Terezin

Today my family and I went to visit Terezin. It was a Jewish ghetto at first, which was turned into a concentration camp. The first thing we saw was the cemetary, with 10,000 buried there (mostly but not all Jews). 3,000 individual headstones, and 7,000 buried in mass graves in the center.

We saw the cell where Gavrilo Princip was held - he was the Serbian national who shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the catalyst event for World War I.

What's strange is, Terezin was constructed originally as a military fortress under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but then shortly after the became allies with the countries they were protecting themselves against (with the fortress), so it was never used for its intended purpose.

We saw the excecution site where many political prisoners were shot by the Nazis in the summer of 1942. There was also a gallow for the hanging of Jews.

The guide showed us the house where the Nazi party's leading families in Terezin stayed, with the swimming pool, SS cinema, and park constructed by camp inhabitants.

We then saw another Jewish cemetary, where 9,000 people who died in the ghettos were buried. Nearby, there was a memorial for the people who died in the extermination/concentration camps, and another cemetary to bury the soldiers who died of typhoid during the emancipation.

The hardest part, for me, by far, was seeing the crematorium. We saw the room where exterminations took place, as well as some autopsies. It was connected to the big room, with four ovens. They were huge, heavy, and built for efficiency.

I'm not sure how much more of this learning I can really handle. Yet how can I say that, when I have not had to live through any of this? My sympathy already weighs so much upon me... I can't even begin to imagine what it would have been like actually living through this era. And to think, Nazism was just the beginning of the terrible times and regimes for Central Europe.