Terezín Ghetto: A Virtual Tour

The Kavalir Barracks housed old and mentally ill prisoners who were separated from the rest of the inmates by a high wooden fence.

Beginning on December 6, 1941, the Dresden Barracks is where women were housed together with their children. Female prisoners slept on thin mattresses on the floor. In the cellar there were cells for prisoners to be punished. Some of the rooms were used for theater and other cultural performances. The soccer match seen in the propaganda film “The Führer Give a City to the Jews” was filmed in the barracks courtyard.

This building was used to house mothers with infants and children under the age of 3. At the end of 1943, it also contained a library and a reading room for more than 100 people.

During the 1944 “beautification” of the ghetto, a wood and glass children’s pavilion went up in this small park. It was decorated with pictures of animals and fitted with a kitchen, showers and beds.

Outside was a playground with swings and seesaws, a sandpit, a paddling pool and a carousel.

All of it was built to be seen by the International Red Cross delegation that toured Terezín on June 23, 1944. About 7,500 people had been deported to Auschwitz beforehand so the ghetto would look less crowded. The photographs here were taken that day by the Red Cross delegate, Maurice Rossel.

According to the Terezín Memorial, 7,590 of the ghetto’s youngest prisoners were deported to the East. Only 142 lived to see liberation.

The Hohenelbe Barracks were used as a hospital with a central laboratory. There was also a central bath with a small swimming pool.

This building was the headquarters of the SS Commandant until 1942. Later a post office and other services were located on the first floor. It also served as a barracks for young girls, ages 16-18, who published a magazine called “BONACO.”

The beautiful Empire church was built during the years of 1805-1810. During the time Terezín was used as a ghetto, the church was closed. Blankets were stored here for a short time, and prisoners had access to the tower to take care of the clock.

This building was used as a home for girls ages 8-16. Art lessons were given here by Friedl Dicker-Brandeisova. In the cellar, rehearsals were held for Verdi’s Requiem and Smetana’s opera The Bartered Bride. Rafael Schächter, who led many of these rehearsals, was a Romanian conductor, pianist and opera coach of Jewish origin and an organizer of cultural life in Terezín.

This former brewery was converted into a disinfection station, shower and laundry.

In 1943, a woodworking shop was established in this location. Prisoners made bunks, coffins, urns and other furniture. It is currently used as a riding school as it was before WWII.

The Magdeburg Barracks housed the Council of the Elders and the offices of the Jewish self-government. It now houses a museum of culture.

Entrance to Theresienstadt. A transport of Jewish prisoners marches through the snow from the Bauschovitz train station to Theresienstadt. Czechoslovakia, 1942.

The Aussig Barracks were originally the ghetto’s “Schleuse,” where prisoners were registered on arrival.

The building later became the central clothing store, holding clothing from the luggage confiscated from prisoners. The better items were sent to the Reich, and the rest went to the ghetto’s “shops.”

The space behind the barracks was the site of the ghetto’s two mass executions. In December 1941 the SS commander called a roll call and announced that evidence of forbidden letters had been found. He threatened collective punishment and promised that anyone who confessed would not be punished. Some prisoners came forward. The promise was a trick.

On January 10, 1942, nine men who had admitted contact with the outside world were hanged. On February 26, 1942, seven more were executed for the same offense. Among the dead were men who had written secret letters and one who had removed the yellow star from his coat. Other prisoners were forced to build the gallows, dig the mass grave and act as hangman.

No more executions were carried out inside the ghetto after that. Prisoners were instead punished by transfer to the Gestapo prison in the Small Fortress or by being placed on a transport to the East.

Prisoners were brought to the Bodenbach Barracks upon arrival. They had to go through a “šlojska” or checkpoint. In 1943, the Barracks were used for needs of the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office).

This building is where the SS soldiers lived. There was a dining hall on the ground floor. Today it is a hotel with a restaurant.

The SS and their families relaxed in Brunnen Park.

A school before the war, L 417 became a home for boys ages 10 to 15 in 1942.

In Home 1, a 14-year-old from Prague named Petr Ginz started a weekly magazine called Vedem (“We Lead”) and served as its editor. The boys wrote it mostly by hand: poems, essays, drawings and reports on life in the ghetto. It ran from December 1942 to the summer of 1944 and filled more than 800 pages.

Their teacher, Valtr Eisinger, encouraged the magazine and the boys’ self-government. Secret lessons were held in the attic, and the gym was used for performances.

Ginz was deported to Auschwitz on September 28, 1944, and murdered there at 16. In 2003, a copy of his drawing “Moon Landscape,” the Earth as seen from the Moon, was carried into space aboard the shuttle Columbia by Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon. The original is at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

The Ghetto Museum opened in this building in 1991.

The council chamber of the town hall was used for concerts and other cultural events, and the building was the seat of the ghetto court.

On May 12, 1943, the “Bank of the Jewish Self-Administration” opened here on SS orders. It issued its own notes, from 1 to 100 crowns, each printed with a head of Moses.

Prisoners received a small monthly wage in this money, and a larger sum was credited to a savings account they could never draw on. The money bought almost nothing: a seat in the coffeehouse, a ticket to a performance, or a prisoner’s own confiscated belongings back from the ghetto shops.

The bank existed to be shown. When Red Cross delegates visited, its directors had to deliver a scripted talk on the ghetto’s economy, and the 1944 propaganda film shows crowds at its counters.

Its head, Desider Friedmann, the last president of Vienna’s Jewish community, was later deported to Auschwitz and did not survive. Today the building houses the town offices.

This building was a home for pre-school and early school-age children. There was also a kitchen for the children, a dining room and a small bakery.

This building was used to house children and apprentices, and also contained an infirmary and an outpatient clinic for youths.

Today this is a quiet park at the center of town. It looked very different during the ghetto years.

In 1943 the square was fenced off and covered by a large circus tent. Inside, prisoners assembled and packed crates of equipment for German army vehicles in what was called “K-Production.”

The drawing is from that year. Bedřich Fritta, a Prague artist imprisoned here, ran the ghetto’s drawing office and secretly recorded what he saw. He looks down over the steep rooftops onto Lange Strasse, the street beside the square. It was divided by a fence, and the prisoners’ side is packed from wall to wall with people and carts. A dark flag flies from the tower above them, and the church steeple stands at the right.

In the spring of 1944 the SS prepared the ghetto for a visit from the International Red Cross, a campaign known as the “beautification.” The tent and the fence came down. A lawn with paths was laid, 1,200 rose bushes were planted, and a music pavilion was built in the corner in front of the café.

The photograph was taken by the Red Cross delegate Maurice Rossel on June 23, 1944, the day of the visit. An orchestra of prisoners plays in the new pavilion for a crowd, with the garrison church behind.

Later that summer the square was filmed for the Nazi propaganda film, in which a jazz band plays in the same pavilion. Most of the musicians were deported to Auschwitz that fall. Fritta was arrested in July 1944 for his drawings and died in Auschwitz that November.

During the time of the ghetto, this building contained a theater where live performances were given. It was also where the ghetto guard was housed. The ghetto guard was a unit of young male inmates organized by the Nazis to keep order in the ghetto. Most of them were eventually sent on transports to the death camps, and were later replaced by 150 men over the age of 45 who made up the new ghetto guard.

A shop selling underwear and clothing was opened in this location. The items came from the luggage of the prisoners.

In 1942, a café with approximately 100 seats was opened on this site. “Ersatz” coffee and tea were served, and the Jews could listen to live music or watch cabaret scenes. An entry ticket was valid for 90-minutes.

From 1942 on, this was the headquarters of the SS Commandant. In the cellar, the SS built a so-called “bunker” where prisoners who violated camp orders were jailed, tortured and interrogated by the Gestapo.

The Hannover Barracks for men also housed one of the large-capacity kitchens. The cellars were used for rehearsals of different musical performances.

Before June 1943, incoming prisoners had to walk 2 miles from the nearest railroad station. That walk ended here, in front of the Hamburg Barracks, which housed mostly women. Dutch prisoners were also housed here beginning in 1943.

Everyone wanted to work in the bakery because life in Terezín meant going hungry. It was the best place to work for children up to age 14.

The Theresienstadt ghetto had its own police force. It was special unit of the Protectorate gendarmerie and was housed here. The police guarded the borders of the ghetto and escorted prisoners when they left town to avoid contact with the outside world.

The Bauhoff building was used as craft workshops. A gas chamber was also built near here in 1945, in the corridor of Ravelin XVIII (a ravelin is a V shaped fortification used to protect the entrance of a fort.¹), but was never used.

¹ From the Oxford Dictionaries online.

Just off the courtyard of this building, Artur Berliger, who came to Terezín in September 1942, created a secret synagogue. The original inscriptions in Hebrew can still be seen today. Above the synagogue, is a so-called “Mancarda” — an attic where five men lived.

Between 1942-1943 the Nazis constructed a branch railroad line to the Terezín ghetto using the ghetto’s Jewish inmates as labor.

The Jäger Barracks were a quarantine area and a dormitory for elderly prisoners.

The bastion behind the Jäger Barracks, known as the Südberg or “South Hill,” was laid out as a sports ground and walking area for children and adults. Young prisoners leveled the field themselves.

It was the one place in the ghetto with a view over the walls, toward Litoměřice and the hills beyond.

From 1942 to 1944 the ghetto ran its own soccer league, with at least a dozen teams a year. Most teams represented workplaces, such as the kitchen workers, the clothing warehouse and the youth counselors. Games were played seven to a side in the courtyard of the Dresden Barracks (stop 2) and drew thousands of prisoners as spectators. Results and standings were reported in the ghetto’s handwritten children’s magazines.

The Nazi propaganda film shows athletics and women’s handball here on the Südberg. The film’s soccer match was staged in the Dresden Barracks courtyard in front of a crowd of prisoners.

The video shows prisoners in Terezín playing soccer.

The Engineering Barracks were used for elderly prisoners and as a hospital for urological, neurological and cardiac diseases, as well as tuberculosis.

The ghetto began here. On November 24, 1941, the first transport arrived: the Aufbaukommando, a “construction detail” of 342 young Jewish men from Prague sent to convert the garrison town into a ghetto. Rafael Schächter arrived six days later, and accounts place his first men’s chorus in this building’s basement.

The photograph shows the barracks as it stands today. The three drawings are by Bedřich Fritta, a Prague artist imprisoned in Terezín who ran the ghetto’s drawing office and secretly recorded what he saw.

His 1942 drawing of the men’s living quarters shows bunks stacked three high and reached by ladders, with numbered suitcases on the floor. A thin man sits on a stool in the foreground with his head in his hand, and others sit at a table by the window.

In the drawing of the yard, from 1943, a line of bent figures with canes crosses the open ground between two bare black trees. One figure in a cap stands by the gate.

The third drawing records what happened that summer. In July 1943 the Sudeten and Bodenbach barracks were cleared within 24 hours, displacing more than 6,400 prisoners. Fritta looks through the arches at a courtyard crowded with people carrying bundles and pulling carts. Broken wooden frames, ladders and a chair lie in the foreground.

The barracks were emptied to make room for the archive of the RSHA, which was moved here from Berlin. The RSHA was the Reich Security Main Office, the SS headquarters in Berlin that controlled the Gestapo and organized the deportation of Europe’s Jews.

The Sokol gymnasium, just outside the inner ring of fortifications, was used as a hospital for typhoid and later encephalitis patients.

For the 1944 “beautification” it was converted into a community center with a hall for concerts and theater, a library, a prayer room and a terrace.

The Red Cross delegation watched the children’s opera Brundibár here on June 23, 1944.

The video shows the finale of Brundibár as it appears in the Nazi propaganda film, which was shot in the ghetto in August and September 1944 to present it as a pleasant place to live.