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The Children of Terezin |
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1941 Toward sunrise, "[The] children screamed. They wanted food, water. This was not the first time. But we took nothing with us. We had no food and no water, and we did not know the reason. The children were hungry and thirsty. We were held this way for 24 hours while they were searching the houses all the time -- searching for valuables." |
Photograph For additional information on The Poems of the Children of Terezin Click Here For Photos and History on of the Children of Terezin Click Here |
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The concentration camp Terezin was Hitler’s “Model Ghetto.” A careful façade of a village, complete with schools, shops, and even an orchestra was created to mask the ghetto and camp functioning within. In 1941, shortly after the camp was created, a film, "Hitler Gives the Jews a Town", was shot in Terezin. Images of schoolchildren singing were sent to the outside world by propaganda machine. Some 15,000 children came through Terezin. Although forbidden to do so, they attended school. They painted pictures, wrote poetry and otherwise tried to maintain a vestige of normalcy. According to the Terezin Memorial Museum, 63 transports left Terezin for the East, carrying a total of more than 87,000 individuals; of these, only 3,800 would see liberation. The fate of the children of Terezin was equally tragic: of the 7,590 youngest prisoners deported, only 142 survived until liberation. Only those children who remained for the whole period at Terezin had any real chance of being saved. On the day of liberation Terezin contained 1600 children aged 15 or under. One of the performances the children gave to outsiders was the opera Brundibar. The picture above is of the final scene of the opera taken from a propaganda film. The drawings and poems by the children of Terezin are among the most poignant documents of the Holocaust. With its high proportion of artists and intellectuals, culture flourished in the ghetto alongside starvation, disease and the constant dread of the continuous transports to the death camps.
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