Terezín is a town in the Ústí nad Labem Region near Litoměřice, which came into being together with the fortress. It is associated with the Terezín Memorial, with the internment camp of 1945 to 1948 and with later efforts to revive the town.
Terezín is a town in the Ústí nad Labem Region not far from Litoměřice, near the rivers Ohře and Elbe. It belongs to the administrative district of the municipality with extended powers of Litoměřice [1]. It came into being together with the fortress, and its history is tied to Habsburg defence, the Nazi occupation and the postwar internment camp.
The founding of the fortress and the town
From the hill of Radobýl, in clear weather, one can see a small town set in the greenery of old trees, from which the church tower rises. The radio programme Toulky českou minulostí looks for the beginnings of Terezín in the 18th century. From the three Silesian wars and the War of the Bavarian Succession, which from 1740 lasted almost four decades, it followed that the defensive system built in Silesia, in Moravia and in Bohemia in the second half of the 17th century did not suit the way war was waged. The expansionist policy of the Prussian king Frederick II was a permanent threat to the territorial integrity of the monarchy [4].
The enemy pushed into Silesia, Moravia, Austria and the interior of Bohemia and towards Prague. The north-western border region of Bohemia, the left bank of the Elbe and the Ohře valley became in the following years an easy route for Prussian troops, who marched along it towards Prague twice [4].
Terezín Memorial
The Czechoslovak government decided on 6 May 1947 to establish a memorial in Terezín. The places of suffering in it were to be preserved in the form they had during the Nazi regime and to serve as a permanent reminder for future generations. In 1964 the original name, Památník národního utrpení (Memorial of National Suffering), was changed to Terezín Memorial. According to its website, it is a state-funded organisation of the Ministry of Culture and the only institution of this kind in the Czech Republic [3].
The memorial consists of several separate sites that do not form a continuous complex. These are the Small Fortress with the former Gestapo police prison and permanent exhibitions, the Ghetto Museum, the National Cemetery established in 1945, a monument on the bank of the Ohře, the Park of Terezín Children, the former Magdeburg Barracks with exhibitions on cultural life in the ghetto, and a Jewish prayer room with a reconstruction of the so-called attic dwelling, an emergency lodging of the ghetto prisoners. At the Ohře, prisoners were in November 1944 ordered by the SS to pour into the river the ashes of about 22,000 people cremated in the ghetto crematorium [3].
The internment camp in 1945 to 1948
The buildings of the former Gestapo prison in the Small Fortress became, almost immediately after the SS members fled, a collection point for detained Germans. At first it was a spontaneous process, and the internees were guarded by former prisoners. The whole complex was taken over by the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior on 29 May 1945 [2].
About 3,800 men, women and children apparently passed through the camp. More than sixty percent of them had Czechoslovak citizenship before the war; the rest were mainly Germans who had fled the front from the territory of the Reich and from other European countries. The camp was originally to serve for the internment of persons who, according to the thinking of the time, had committed grave offences against the Czech nation, but the later main purpose of the camp was the expulsion of Germans. War criminals were indeed held there temporarily, but they made up only a tiny fraction of the internees [2].
The Terezín Memorial states that harsh living conditions and a strict regime prevailed in the camp. The internees were watched by warders and a numerous guard, accommodation and food were very poor, especially in 1945, and most people were used as labour in the camp, in Terezín and in surrounding businesses and farms [2].
The vast majority of internees were handed over to courts, prisons, collection centres or other camps, which meant expulsion or criminal prosecution. More than half of the Germans gathered in Terezín were transported to Germany in 1946 and 1947. At least 548 people died in the camp, mainly because of poor conditions, malnutrition and infectious diseases. The fate of several dozen others cannot be satisfactorily explained, and some of them probably became victims of violence by the warders. The camp was officially abolished as of 1 January 1948, and the last internees left it during February. The memorial's database, compiled mainly from the sources of the Státní okresní archiv Litoměřice, contains data on 3,725 persons who undoubtedly passed through the camp [2].
The town after the army's departure
According to an article in Hospodářské noviny, the army, because of which the town had come into being, left Terezín for good in 1997. The number of inhabitants fell from seven thousand to roughly two thousand, and the former military buildings take up forty percent of the town's area. Of an annual budget of 35 million crowns, four million go to guarding, insuring and maintaining them. The 18th-century buildings are decaying [5].
The newspaper describes several attempts to revive the town. At the end of the 1990s the association of artists M.E.C.C.A. began to use some of the buildings as art workshops and to hold a film festival, which was interrupted by the floods of 2002. A later plan to turn Terezín into a university town ended in failure. A third plan counted on subsidies totalling half a billion crowns. The Ministry of Culture was to set up archives and depositories in some of the buildings, the Ústí nad Labem Region wanted to use others for teaching the humanities with a focus on the Holocaust, and the Czech Academy of Sciences was to acquire the former military hospital [5].
The town flag
According to data from the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, the flag consists of a black hoist wedge with yellow joined initials MT, bordered by a red chevron. The upper half of the flag is filled with four slanting stripes alternating black and yellow, the lower half with four diagonal stripes with yellow and black in the opposite order. The ratio of the width of the flag to its length is 2:3 [1].
Chronology
- — The Terezín Memorial announced that the Ghetto Museum in Terezín will close from 2 November for reconstruction based on the winning architectural design and is due to reopen in 2029. ČTK / České noviny iDNES.cz: Ústí nad Labem