Terezín

Terezín was originally built by the Austrians in the 18th century to house soldiers guarding the Austrian frontier with Prussia. During World War II the Germans were quick to recognize the garrison and surrounding town as a potential concentration camp.

Terezín was an exception among the many Nazi concentration camps scattered around Central Europe. The Germans, for a time, used it as a showcase camp in order to deflect international criticism of their policy toward Jews. In the early years of the war—until as late as 1944—the detainees were permitted a semblance of normal life, with limited self-government, schools, a theater, and a library. (Pictures drawn by the children at Terezín, at their drawing lessons in school, are on display in Prague's Jewish museum.) The International Red Cross was even permitted to inspect the town in 1944. Nazis prepared for the visit by sprucing it up with a fresh coat of paint.

Through 1944 and 1945, as the Nazis' war effort soured, the masquerade of their benevolence in Terezín was dropped. Train transports to Auschwitz and other death camps to the east were stepped up to a rate of several a week. In all, some 87,000 Jews from Terezín were murdered in this way, and another 35,000 died from starvation or disease. The conductor Karel Ancerl, who died in 1973, and the novelist Ivan Klíma are among the few thousand who survived imprisonment at Terezín.

The shock in visiting Terezín today is that it's pretty much remained the same. To their credit, Czechs have done very little to dress it up for visitors. You're free to walk the town's run-down streets and imagine what it must have been like to be held prisoner there. It's dark, depressing, and at the same time, profoundly engrossing.