The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt by Anna Hájková (review)

At the very end of The Last Ghetto, a book based on her dissertation, Anna Hájková emphasizes that the "task of a Holocaust historian is to apply systematic, unsentimental analysis together with radical empathy, listening to a kaleidoscope of voices always asking what are the stories that are not told" (242). These are not empty words; with her study about Theresienstadt she has done exactly this.

Most people thought this place in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was well investigated long ago; only recently the US Holocaust Memorial Museum copublished a translation of the foundational 1950s book by H. G. Adler about the ghetto. However, instead of focusing on the perpetrators and the persecution, Hájková provides us with a microhistorical analysis of the changing inmate population, including their struggles, limitations, hopes, and failures. By highlighting the individual agency of the Jews, she rightly challenges Hannah Arendt's claim that totalitarian regimes strip the incarcerated of humanity and Lawrence Langer's dictum of the "choiceless choices" in the face of mass murder.

Repurposing a late eighteenth-century fort, the SS first established a transit ghetto for the Protectorate Jews in Theresienstadt on November 24, 1941. The place had hitherto attracted the attention of historians mostly as a destination for elderly German Jews and/or because of an SS propaganda charade deceiving Red Cross inspectors. However, over time 74,000 Jews from the Protectorate, 600 from Sudeten, 1,400 from Slovakia, 42,000 from Germany, 15,000 from Austria, 4,900 from the Netherlands, 466 from Denmark, and 1,150 from Hungary were brought to the ghetto. Of those 143,000 Jews, 34,000 died there; many more perished after their deportations to the East.

This thorough study aims to investigate how the Jewish prisoners adapted to and lived under extreme circumstances in the ghetto until its liberation on May 9, 1945. Based on sources from over eighty public and private archives in ten countries, Hájková is able to recenter our understanding of Theresienstadt as a place with a dynamic and changing prisoner society led by a young Czech social elite. With close reading of a vast array of survivor testimonies and diaries, Hájková guides the reader through a jungle of relationships that were complicated to begin with, laden with lost or gained social status and power, and made more fraught by SS control and looming deportations. This critical account does not shy away from addressing the dark sides of prisoner agency: power originating from inmate hierarchies established along ethnic and age lines, gender discrimination, and sexual abuse.

The first of five chapters discusses the perpetrators and the Jewish self-administration. Beside the commandants, only 28 SS personnel were on site, plus between 120 and 150 Czech guards. The SS appointed a so-called Council of Jewish Elders to organize the ghetto. The Czech Jacob Edelstein became the first elder, replaced by the German Paul Eppstein in January 1943. After he was murdered, Benjamin Murmelstein took over in September 1944. The Jewish self-administration consisted of eight departments, including youth welfare, health services, and recreation. The second chapter explores the ghetto population as a "human society." Hájková challenges the Theresienstadt "master narrative," established already during the war, of a successful community of prisoners. This moral story prescribed appropriate conduct and preserved power for the first arrivals: the young Czechs, according to Hájková. Based on age, national origin, work, and access to resources, the emerging hierarchies discriminated against certain prisoners and groups, sometimes with fatal consequences.

Although the situation was never as horrific as in Warsaw, the third chapter describes hunger as the defining ghetto inmate experience. Because of the scarcity, access to food translated to power. Malnutrition and hierarchies also greatly affected individual health. In chapter 4, we learn that in February 1943, 31 percent of inmates were sick. Thousands of elderly Jews died from enteritis. Despite scarce medical supplies, Jewish doctors performed surgeries and even conducted...