Terezín

Just the word Terezín (Theresienstadt in German) immediately recalls the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust for Czechs. Originally built as a military city in the 18th century, Nazis quickly saw its potential, and removed the 7,000 original inhabitants to turn the city into a Jewish ghetto, and the fortress into a prison. Terezín was the main Nazi concentration camp in Bohemia; but it wasn't designed as a death camp, even though in the end more than 38,000 people died in either the ghetto or prison. The city was supposed to be a "model" Jewish settlement, part of a humane façade the Nazis presented to the Red Cross in 1944.