The story of this place
Built as an 18th-century fortress named for Empress Maria Theresa, Terezín was converted in 1941 into a Jewish ghetto and transit camp. The Nazis cynically dressed it up as a 'gift to the Jews', staging a fake town — a café, a bank, gardens — to fool a 1944 Red Cross inspection, then filming a propaganda movie before deporting most of the cast to Auschwitz. Despite starvation and disease, its inmates created astonishing art, music and lectures; the children's opera Brundibár was performed dozens of times. Of roughly 155,000 Jews sent through Terezín, about 33,000 died there and some 88,000 were deported east to death camps. The children's drawings and poems survive as witness.