Almost 70 years after the end of WWII and the fall of the Nazi regime, distinctive traces of life at the former Theresienstadt concentration camp, never seen, are coming to light.
Tens of thousands of people died in the Nazi camp, an old fortress, some killed outright and others dying from malnutrition and disease. More than 150,000 other persons (including tens of thousands of children) were held there for months or years, before being sent by rail transports to their deaths at Treblinka and Auschwitz death camps in occupied Poland.
The finds, which have been discovered throughout the modern day town of Terezín, located in the Czech Republic, will officially be made public in May 2015.
The first results of the documentation of these relics have just been made available online at www.ghettospuren.de. An English language version will go online soon.
The objects that have been found thus far were discovered in buildings throughout the small Czech town. They are generally simple and often very personal messages from the past. Today, messages of love, satirical verses, simple initials left as life-signs, as well as murals expressing a longing for home are but a few of the many fragments of prison-life being found and meticulously documented by experts throughout Terezin.
The material evidence that has been found thus far are relics from the time when Terezin was better known as Theresienstadt, an enormous prison for Jews from half of Europe – whose inmates had to organize their daily survival from within the attics and cellars of the town’s buildings as well from the casemates of the old fortress.
For almost 70 years, no one showed interest in these relics.
“When we started our internet campaign in 2012, we knew only of a handful of these
hidden treasures”, said Uta Fischer, manager of the project ‘’Material evidence and traces“ initiated in May 2012. “During the past two years we continued stumbling on dozens of new finds”, she continued.
“O bug, why dances thou on me all night … ” With these words written onto the walls of an attic, an unknown prisoner sarcastically immortalizes his complaint about the bugs in the ghetto. The bug itself, cause of his torments, was also doodled on a wall as were touching animal scenes painted for a little child’s eyes, in another attic. And yet elsewhere in Terezín, members of the ghetto police left their mark on a sandstone archway.
Many of these silent witnesses are doomed to disappear because of building renovations, vandalism,and erosion. Uta Fischer, a city planner based in Berlin, took the initiative in bringing this documentation project to life “before it is too late”.
She sees an urgent need to document Theresienstadt’s hidden treasures now.
She is supported by an acclaimed and dedicated team of German and Czech experts, including conservators Prof. Thomas Danzl and Karol Bayer, news photographer Roland Wildberg as well as building researcher Jiri Smutny. Financing was made possible by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, the German Federal Cultural Foundation and other institutions in Germany and Czech Republic.