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Holocaust
Anti-Jewish
Pomlčková
válka
Regulations
The Terezín
Family Camp
Theresienstadt
Ghetto
Karel
Poláček
Milena
Jesenská
The Reich
Pogrom
Holocaust
The Jewish
Resistance
How many points
does the Star of David
have?
Discriminatory labelling with the Star of David affected all Jews from the age of six and upwards.
Photo Czech news agency
From 1939 onwards the Jews in our country were exposed to persecution, just as in Nazi
Germany. The basic means utilised was the application of the doctrine of the Nuremberg
Laws, which had already been applied in Germany since 1935, serving to justify racial
discrimination and subsequently leding to the initiation of genocide. The goal of the occupiers,
together with those protectorate authorities who were collaborating, was, by implementing
a plenitude of regulations to gradually “legally” remove Jews from society, excluding them
from the rest of the population and to dispossess them of all their rights. Thereby Jews
were excluded from the government, from a number of professions, their presence in public
places was restricted and they were forbidden to buy certain types of goods and foods. The
most evident discrimination, involving the compulsory wearing of the yellow Jewish star,
was introduced in 1941. All these measures were directed towards intimidating, isolating,
impoverishing and excluding Jews from normal social and economic life. This bullying,
rigorously implemented daily, led to the direct route to the extermination camps.
Learn about...
Holocaust
Anti-Jewish
Regulations
The
Terezín
Vznik
České
republiky
Family
Camp
Theresienstadt
Ghetto
Karel
Poláček
Milena
Jesenská
The Reich
Pogrom
Holocaust
The Jewish
Resistance
When do we
commemorate the
International
Holocaust
Remembrance Day?
The gate to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp following its liberation in January 1945. Photo Czech news agency
In September 1943 two special transports from the Theresienstadt ghetto arrived at the
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, carrying 5,000 Jews from the Czech lands. These,
unlike the others that had been arriving, did not undergo selection, nor were their heads
shaved and families were not split-up. Men, women and children were all placed in the
BIIb section, which later became known as the Familienlager or the Terezín Family Camp.
Although the conditions there were as abysmal as they were in the rest of the camp, the
children, for example, were allowed to remain in the common house during the day, where
impromptu teaching was conducted. On the night of the 8th to the 9th March 1944, however,
in accordance with the original plan, 3,792 of the camp residents who had remained alive
were murdered in the gas chambers. A few months later, on the 12th and the 13th of July
1944, the same fate befell an additional 6 or 7 thousand of the Jews from other transports
and subsequently the Family Camp was shut down. According to historians, it is most probable
that the creation of the Terezín Family Camp was prepared as a cynical cover-up in case of
a possible visit by the Red Cross. What is certain is that in March and in July 1944 the Nazis
committed the largest mass-murder of Czechoslovak citizens. Of the 17,500 prisoners at the
Family Camp only 1,294 survived.
Learn about...
Holocaust
Anti-Jewish
Regulations
The Terezín
Family Camp
Theresienstadt
Čechy
Ghetto
nebo Česko?
Karel
Poláček
Milena
Jesenská
The Reich
Pogrom
Holocaust
The Jewish
Resistance
How many Jews from
the Czech lands were
transported to the
Theresienstadt ghetto?
A drawing by Marie Fantlová (1930–1944) when she was thirteen years old representing the view of the countryside
from the Terezín ghetto depicting a field and the setting sun. Photo The Prague Jewish Museum
Terezín was built between 1780 and 1790 as a fortress to guard the northern access routes
to the interior of Bohemia. The German occupation authorities first established the Prague
Gestapo’s Police Prison in the Small Fortress and later an enclosed ghetto in the town
itself. From November 1941 onwards, the vast majority of the Jews from the Protectorate
were gradually concentrated there. Other transports also arrived from Germany, Austria,
the Netherlands, Denmark and Slovakia. The total number of prisoners in Terezín reached
155,000, of whom 35,000 died there. In the period of the ghetto 60,000 Jews were squeezed
into the town in which 8,000 inhabitants had lived before the war. Terezín became a transit
point, usually on the journey to the extermination camps. In the crowded ghetto, living in
squalid conditions and in constant fear of the next day, of the few consolations available one
was art and another was caring for the children, representing the future. Teaching, concerts,
improvised theatre, drawing and writing did not signify mere entertainment, but rather
a means of survival and of the preservation of human dignity.
Learn about...
Holocaust
Anti-Jewish
Regulations
The Terezín
Family Camp
Theresienstadt
Ghetto
Karel
Prezident
Poláček
Milena
Jesenská
The Reich
Pogrom
Holocaust
The Jewish
Resistance
Karel Poláček with his wife Adéla and their daughter Jiřina in cca. 1935. Photo Czech news agency
In which town
does the action in the
novel “Bylo nás pět”
take place?
One of the many, who went through the horror of Auschwitz, was Karel Poláček
(1892–1945), the author of several books, including comic books, Muži v offsidu (Men in
Offside) and Bylo nás pět (There Were Five Of Us). In the period of the First Republic he
was an editor who wrote reports of court cases, short stories and essays. The German
occupation and racial persecution prevented him from publishing and, for that reason,
his novel Hostinec u Kamenného stolu (The Stone Table Inn) was published under the
name of the painter Vlastimil Rada. Poláček worked in the Jewish Community as a
librarian until 1943, when he volunteered to join the transport, after his life partner
was included in it. In the autumn of 1944 he was transported from Theresienstadt to
Auschwitz concentration camp, which he left during the evacuation of the prisoners.
He died in January 1945, when all trace of him disappeared during a death march
between concentration camps in Silesia.
Learn about...
Holocaust
Anti-Jewish
Regulations
The Terezín
Family Camp
Theresienstadt
Ghetto
Karel
Poláček
Milena
Vláda
Jesenská
The Reich
Pogrom
Holocaust
The Jewish
Resistance
Since when has
the title of Righteous
Among the Nations
been awarded?
Milena
Jesenská
Photo Czech
news agency
Milena Jesenská (1896-1944), a writer and translator, best known worldwide as a close
friend of Franz Kafka, with whom she corresponded from 1919, when she began to translate
his work into Czech, until their mutual cooperation and correspondence ended in 1923,
shortly before Kafka’s death. Her own work - essays, articles, personal testimony and other
reports about the interwar years in Central Europe did not enjoy their deserved recognition
until after the end of the Second World War. After the rest of Bohemia and Moravia had been
attached to the Third Reich she was actively involved in the anti-Nazi resistance movement
and assisted a number of Jewish families to emigrate. In November 1939 she was arrested
for her anti-Nazi activities and in the following year she was deported for “re-edu­cation” to
the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died of typhus. In 2004, the Yad Vashem
Memorial in Jerusalem awarded Milena Jesenská the title of Righteous Among the Nations,
designated for people of non-Jewish origin who contributed to the rescue of persecuted
Jews during the war.
Learn about...
Holocaust
Anti-Jewish
Regulations
The Terezín
Family Camp
Theresienstadt
Ghetto
Karel
Poláček
Milena
Jesenská
The Reich
Parlament
Pogrom
Holocaust
The Jewish
Resistance
Did the Reich
pogrom also occur
in the Czech lands?
The conflagration of the synagogue in Liberec on the 10th of November 1938. Photo The Regional Research Library in Liberec
On the night of 9th to 10th November 1938 a state-organised pogrom against Jews took
place throughout the whole of Germany, which, based on the shards that were all that
remained of hundreds of Jewish shops, is remembered in history as Kristallnacht. Serving
as the pretext for this was the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris who was
gunned-down by a young Jewish man who had been expelled from Germany. During the
pogrom nearly all the synagogues in the Reich were destroyed, usually burned-down, while
Jewish shops and businesses were looted. About 7,500 Jewish shops were reported to have
been demolished. During the actual pogrom 100 Jews were killed and subsequently about
30,000 were deported to concentration camps. They were not released from the camps until
they made a commitment to emigrate and their property had been seized on behalf of the
Reich. The Nazis additionally ordered the German Jews to pay a fine of one billion marks,
about 10% of the Government Revenues. The November pogrom of 1938 heralded the
complete physical extermination of the Jews.
Learn about...
Holocaust
Anti-Jewish
Regulations
The Terezín
Family Camp
Theresienstadt
Ghetto
Karel
Poláček
Milena
Jesenská
The Reich
Pogrom
Holocaust
The Jewish
Resistance
What is the term
used by Jews
to describe the
holocaust?
The Holocaust Memorial in the Pinkas Synagogue comprises a list of the Czech and the Moravian Jews who perished under
the Nazis. Photo The Prague Jewish Museum
The term holocaust is derived from the Greek word “holokauston”, which represents
a designation of a religious offering that is totally burned. It was first used by the Nobel
Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel in relation to the systematic mass-murder of Jews in
his novel The Night (La Nuit, 1958). In our country, as of the date of the creation of the
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, there were approximately 120,000 people of Jewish
origin. Less than 30,000 of these escaped from the dangers of Nazism by emigrating,
while almost all the Jews who remained in the Protectorate (over 81,000 people) were
deported to concentration camps or to ghettos. Of these less than 10,000 survived.
About 10,000 other Jews preferred suicide to deportation. A total number of around
6 million Jews were murdered in the course of the genocide perpetrated by Nazi
Germany and its allies during the Second World War.
Learn about...
Holocaust
Anti-Jewish
Regulations
The Terezín
Family Camp
Theresienstadt
Ghetto
Karel
Poláček
Milena
Jesenská
The Reich
Pogrom
Holocaust
The Jewish
V Evropské
unii
Resistance
Where did
the largest Jewish
revolt against the
Nazis take place?
The Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto in May 1943. Photo Czech news agency
The suffering of the Jews between 1938 and 1945, their systematic persecution and their tragic fate,
still overshadow the fact that Czechoslovak Jews did not all surrender to fate and instead joined
the resistance movements that existed in Bohemia, Moravia and the Slovak Republic. Thousands
of them, both men and women, joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile in their hands they fought
against Nazism and fascism on all the fronts of the Second World War. They were in action in the
East and in the West and they fought in some of the major battles of the Second World War, for
example in Tobruk, Sokolovo, Dukla and Dunkerque. According to rough estimates, Jews comprised
about 32% of the men in the Czechoslovak Army in exile in Great Britain in 1943, 35% of these
were in active service in the Soviet Union in 1942 and even as many as 50% them were active in the
Middle East. Domestically Jews were active in partisan groups, including participating in the Slovak
National Uprising. The Jewish resistance also took other forms, however. During the period of the
deportation they played a large role both in the ghettos and in the concentration camps by helping
others, by saving lives and by slowing-down the Nazi killing machine. In this situation resistance
and maintaining their own dignity also happened to be heroism.