The Creative Life at Terezin Concentration Camp

The Terezin Promise

I am very interested in the Holocaust and have been fascinated  by the rich cultural community  at Terezin concentration camp (or the Thereisenstadt  ghetto as the Germans called it).  Here is one of my works:  
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24i4ZtnCKA4

Terezin was a town near Prague which was walled and transformed in a concentration camp by the Nazis.  Hitler  wanted the world to know  that it was “a city for the Jews” where  Jewish scholars, professionals, artists, musicians and  political prisoners from several countries were encouraged to lead a creative life and could  be protected  from the stresses of the war. The Nazis  created  this façade  in order to deceive the world, especially the International Red Cross, into believing  that the Jews were safe here.  On the contrary, they were not safe  at all. TerezinConcentration Camp was only a way station: inmates were to be sent to die at Auschwitz-Birkenau, if ever they survived.
In this singular ghetto the artists exposed the truth of this horrible place  through art, poetry  and music. Also children were taught to do so.
One of these artists was Friedl Dicker-Brandeis who secretly  taught art to hundreds of children in the camp from 1942  to 1944. She saw drawing as a means for children to understand their emotions. In  September 1944 she was sent to Auschwitz  where she perished  the next year,  but before she was taken away she gave two suitcases with 4,500 drawings to  one of the chief tutors of the Girls’ Home.  After the war,  the director of the Girls’ Home  brought the suitcases with children's drawings to the Jewish Community in Prague. Today  the drawings are in several museums.One of the many poems found in Terezin is “Butterfly” written by the inmate Pavel Friedman at the age of 21.  It is included in  a collection of works of  art and poetry by Jewish children who were prisoners in  Terezin  Concentration Camp .  The poem “Butterfly” inspired the “Butterfly Project” of the Holocaust Museum  in  Houston. This exhibition features  1.5 million paper   butterflies;  the number symbolizes the number of  children  that died in the  Holocaust. 

 Fifteen thousand of the Terezin inmates were children of which 132 have survived.

I was   also very impressed by “The Terezin Promise: the promise made by a Jewish girl at Terezin, Raja Englandergova, to her teacher, Irena,  not to leave the camp without the poems and drawings of the children of Terezin; the real promise was to live and  hope and to NEVER FORGET.