Shock Report: The Life of European Jews in Hitler's Time *
Spring's end (introduction p.IV)
With the masses of people being deported into Theresienstadt, conditions in the ghetto were grim; the inhabitants experienced overcrowding, malnutrition, disease and the omnipresent fear of the dreaded and continual deportations. However, at the end of 1942, in order to strengthen the deception that the Jews were living well in Theresienstadt before being resettled “in the East” and to counter growing concerns about their well-being, the Germans allowed inmates to engage in cultural activities. A town of pretense, the concerts, theatre, art and poetry created the façade of a “model camp” that was to be part of the German propaganda machine. In September 1944, the Nazis ordered one of the inmates, Kurt Gerron, a distinguished pre-war German-Jewish filmmaker, to make a propaganda film, The Führer Gives the Jews a City, to maintain the fiction that Jews were being treated well. The film was never shown during the war as too many of the scenes failed to convey the positive impressions the Nazis wanted.
We know now that the hundreds of thousands of Jews in Western and Central Europe who were taken from their homes and transit camps were deported to their deaths in Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Maly Trostinets.
For Jewish prisoners at Theresienstadt, these cultural activities became, as the chronicler Zdenek Lederer writes in his landmark study, Ghetto Theresienstadt, “the focal point of artistic achievement and a weapon of spiritual and intellectual resistance by the Jews.” It was this expression of creativity that set life at Theresienstadt apart from other camps and ghettos. Their art and their creation of it is a testament to the resistance of evil that happened on every level and in every place. During the year and a half that John was imprisoned in Theresienstadt, he was able to take advantage of these intellectual activities. He wrote poems for the weekly news magazine, attended talks by teachers and put on plays. He even had his bar mitzvah in Theresienstadt, taught by his rabbi from Cˇ eské Budeˇjovice. A normal life amid the deprivations of imprisonment was continually sought — and shakily established.