Roses bloomed and little children died

BY JIM GIBNEY

A little garden,

Fragrant and full of roses.

The path is narrow

And a little boy walks along it.

A little boy, a sweet boy,

Like that growing blossom.

When the blossom comes to bloom,

The little boy will be no more.

Fifteen-year-old Frantisek Bass wrote this poem, possibly about himself, while a prisoner in the Jewish Ghetto in Terezin, an hour's drive from Prague in the Czech Republic.

The poem is on display below his handsome photograph on a wall in a Museum in Terezin. Around the room's four walls are etched the names of 10,500 children.

Frantisek perished with the Jewish children. They passed through Terezin on their way to Auschwitz or one of the other extermination camps set up in Poland and Germany by the Nazis during the Second World War.

I'd never heard of Terezin until I read Rough Guide to Prague, yet it deserves to be as well known as Treblinka, Dachau or Auschwitz, because it was a very important link in the chain of the Nazis' extermination programme.

Terezin was a transit camp for Jews, captured prisoners and others the Nazis thought undesirables from many parts of central Europe; 140,000 men, women and children passed through Terezin, stayed a while before being transported by train to their deaths in Auschwitz.

Terezin was a Nazi-made Jewish ghetto. One night in 1941, the German Army evicted the local Czech population, 3,500 people, and within a year they housed 60,000 Jews in the town in their place.

35,000 people actually died in Terezin, due to the appaling brutality of the Nazis and the conditions they created in the ghetto.

Their bodies were burned in a crematorium located on the outskirts of the town; with four furnaces working flat out. 180 people were cremated daily.

Their ashes were kept in little cardboard boxes by their relatives and friends in vaults close by until the end of the war, when the SS, desperately trying to cover up their evil deeds, dumped the ashes of 25,000 people into the nearby Ohre River.

The Nazis used Terezin in their propaganda films to mislead the world about their treatment of Jews. The first thing you experience in the museum is a 12-minute film made by the Germans showing life for Jews in Terezin to be wonderful, a million miles away from reality.

Terezin is little more than a hamlet by Irish standards. On first sight it could pass as a military barracks, with squared off streets dominated by squared off buildings, the type you see surrounding a barracks yard.

Upon further reading, I discovered that Terezin has a military history stretching back for centuries as a garrison town protecting Prague from invasion.

Thankfully for the Czechs, the days of military invasion, whether by Germans or Russians, the most recent occupiers, are gone. Now there is a new and more welcome invasion. Tourists are descending on Prague in their tens of thousands every year.

I joined them with a few friends a few weeks ago and sampled Prague, a city of bridges with breathtaking beautiful ancient buildings around practically every corner.

You will find brochures promoting the city's attractions everywhere you go. People will stop you in the street and offer you an opportunity to visit the Castle, a splendid edifice overlooking the town.

There are offers of classical music concerts, of witnessing the astronomical clock chiming in the Old Town Square as it has done several times daily for 600 years.

Or visitors can go for a ride around the city in a car of vintage origin or ride on one of the modern trams — all of which when you are there you should sample and much more besides.

But nowhere did I see Terezin advertised as a place to visit except in the Rough Guide. And if it is advertised elsewhere, then let me apologise to Prague's tourist authorities.

There were no guides on hand to advise strangers in town with an interest in going to Terezin how to get there.

The officials in the city's main information centre were friendly and helpful when I asked them directions but it was down to my and Seanna Walsh's enthusiasm to get ourselves there.

I'm not sure the reason why this holocaust site is being treated in this way because in Prague there is a Jewish quarter which depicts the centuries old persecution of the Jews and it is well advertised and visited.

In another room in the Terezin museum there is a pertinent quote from a 19th Century German writer called Heinreich Heine. He wrote, "....where at first they burn books, in the end they burn people". The Nazis burned books in Germany in May 1933, a few years later they built the gas chambers and burned people.

Terezin is a soulless, drab place. The life is drained out of you as you visit the sites that have been preserved to remember the horror of those times.

Looking at the black and white photos from that era you are overwhelmed by the fear in the people's faces, knowing as they look into the camera, even with a smile, that they are doomed.

At first you have a real sense of powerlessness, of despair, when you are met with such cruelty.

But then you discover that Terezin had its heroes, had people who organised to keep people alive and out of the gas chambers for as long as they could.

Jews came from all over Europe. They were artists, musicians, scholars and writers. Away from the murderous eyes of the Nazis they organised in the cellars and the attics classes for the children, literary evenings for the adults, concerts to keep people's morale up.

They risked their lives to die earlier than was intended to give others sharing a similar fate hope and temporary respite from their gruelling circumstances.

They couldn't save their own lives; they didn't have the military means to fight; they were exhausted and reduced to shadows but in the midst of such darkness they lit a small flicker of light for humanity which burns through to this day.

They left behind a written legacy of their ordeal. It is there in the children's drawings, in the artistry of a camp member, Karl Fleishmann, who drew what he saw and hid it to be found by others; and in the letters to each other.

The fate of the children who passed through Terezin follows you around the town as you go from sad place to sad place.

And you wonder at the capacity of human beings to do what they did. But where there is life there is hope and as we left the mortuary we came upon a group of teenage boys playing football, shouting and screaming, filling the air with raucous laughter as only children can do, and our spirits lifted for life.