Memories of Theresienstadt

Memories of Theresienstadt Mirko Tuma Mirko Tuma was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1921. Mr. Tuma spent three and a half years during World War II in the Czech concentration camp Theresienstadt where he wrote numerous poems, translated Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and adapted Calderon's The Judge of Zalamea. In 1951, he emigrated to the U.S. and resides now in New Jersey where he is a drama and music critic and.frequent lecturer. Theresienstadt-Terezin in Czech-is a hexagonal fortress town in northern Bohemia which used to be known as Sudetenland. Built in the latter part of the 18th century, it was named after Empress Maria Theresia, a woman of passion, culture, and taste, who was genuinely fond of the Wunderkind Mozart. In the old Austro-Hungarian Empire Terezin was a typical garrison town. In 1918, when the Apostolic Monarchy crumbled, Sudetenland became part of Czechoslovakia-the enlightened model democracy endowed by its founder, Professor Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, with Platonic virtues and a progressive social order unequalled in Europe since then. In 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor and later Fuhrer of the defeated, frustrated Germany the Sudetenland, inhabited by Germans, most of whom had never made peace with the Czech reality and with Masaryk's humanism, became a ready target of Nazi propaganda. Under the presidency of Masaryk's pupil and heir designate, Dr. Eduard Benes, an historian, sociologist, and diplomat prone to pedantry and a far lesser intellectual than Masaryk, the tiny island of democracy, Czechoslovakia, hated by Hitler and misunderstood and ultimately betrayed by its principal ally, France, and treated with cynical indifference by England and with cunning and pious platitudes by Stalin's Russia, ultimately fell-in two stages-to the Nazis. In 1938, the infamous Pact of Munich allowed Germany to swallow the Sudetenland (including Terezin) and, in March of 1939, totally occupied Czechoslovakia. Bohemia and Moravia were turned into the Protectorate Bohmen und Mahren. Slovakia, ruled by the pro-Nazi regime, gained a very fictitious independence. 12 During the Masaryk and Benes regimes the Jewish population was treated equally, and hard anti-Semitism which existed primarily in the Sudetenland and the latent quasi-religious anti-Semitism elsewhere were unable to manifest themselves openly to any significant degree. Masaryk had become a prophet for the Jews and, particularly in Bohemia and Moravia, a great part of the Jewish population, led by the younger generation of intellectuals, retained Judaism as a religion, yet assimilated itself into the social fabric of Masaryk's "promised land." There was a minority-mainly the very wealthy element of Jews-who with regard to culture maintained their German ties. These were cosmopolitan or were at least considered to be. The Yiddish and the Zionist element which came primarily from the Eastern part of the country (neighboring Poland), was closer to the German Jews than to the assimilated Czechs who, while having sympathy with the ideals of Herzl, never really joined the Zionist movement. When the Germans, after occupation, created the Office for the Handling of the Jewish Question (Kanzlei Fur die Regelung der Judenfrage), their dealings were predominantly with the German and Zionist elements rather than with the naive Czech Jews who, like my own family, "could never believe it could happen to them." Many of the German Jews and Zionists were somehow capable of emigrating, when emigration was still possible, until the early 1940s. The Czechs, on the other hand, with totally quixotic idealism and disregard of reality, decided to share the destiny of their "Fatherland," come what may, without quite realizing that in Nazi eyes, a Jew was a Jew. I would be remiss not to mention that while a number of non-Jewish Czechs were heroic in assisting the Jews, some of the latent antiSemitism suddenly emerged. There were many Czechs who, while hating the Germans, were quite happy to get rid of the Jews. In the fall of 1941, prodded by the Nazi leadership of the Protectorate on the one hand and Eichmann from Berlin on the other, the government decided to enfore "the final settling of the Judenfrage' -liquidation. Over 2,000 Jews were hustled to the Ghetto Lodz in occupied Poland. Meanwhile...