Alternatives

Theresienstadt – the Jewish ghetto

Theresienstadt or Terezin is an old garrison town about an hour drive from Prague. In 1941 it was turned into a concentration camp, and for more than 80 thousand people also the gateway to the extermination camps in Poland. Visit the Jewish ghetto in the Great Fortress and the Gestapo prison in the small one with us. We take you to the newly discovered “Kinderheim” hidden in the attick of a private house. You get to see the VIP “mansarda” apartments as opposed to the common dorm rooms where 30-50 women or men usually lived together. At the end of the day we take you for a solid Czech lunch in the neighbouring Bohusovice to find a quiet retreat to digest the impressions of the day and get the last questions answered. We count on being back to Prague around 5pm.

Theresienstadt Tour Description

We set off from Prague in the morning heading north towards the Czech-German boarderland, also called Sudetenland where Germans made up the vast majority before the WW2. After Sudetenlad was annexed by Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Terezin (Theresienstadt) became suddenly a boarder town of what was left from the Czechoslovak state. This fortress from the 18th century originally built to stop the Germans from invading the Czech lands, was now to serve as a concentration camp for everybody who was according the the Nurennberg Laws considered a Jew. Almost 200 thousand people from Germany, Czech republic, Austria, Holland, Danmark and other European countries passed the gate of the fortress, more than 80 thousand were sent on to extermination camps in Poland and the Baltic republics, of whom few survived.
Theresinstadt is a memento of the worst tragedy of the 20th century in which 6 million people were murdered based on their ethnic origin and religious bacground. On our tour we take you back in time to understand the facts as well as the atmoshpere of the ghetto referring to the memory of those who survived.
In the end of the war Theresienstadt was used for propaganda purposes. All the malnutritioned, sick and ill-looking were to be transported East, so that only the healthy looking inmates-actresses gave the impression of a well functioning town full of culture and abundant with food given to the Jews by Fuhrer. This propaganda movie disappeared after the war and only reappered in 1960s. We will watch the film in the Holocaust museum before leaving back to Prague.