Theresienstadt Ghetto Research Articles

The Earliest Danish Testimonies About the Theresienstadt Ghetto: Gathered in Sweden by the World Jewish Congress, April 1945

Abstract In April 1945, even before the Theresienstadt ghetto’s liberation, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) began to document the experiences of the Danish Jewish survivors who had been brought to safety in Sweden. Collecting lists of fellow prisoners still in the ghetto and telegrams to relatives, the organization also gathered some of the earliest known written testimonies from Danish survivors. Though the author has to date only uncovered a small sample set of twenty-two testimonies within the organization’s archival holdings, these testimonies shed light on Danish survivors’ fresh memories and impressions of Theresienstadt. When compared to later testimonies, they provide insight into the changing focuses and concerns of survivors. Additionally, the name lists that the survivors compiled add information about their networks in the ghetto, and the telegrams that survivors sent through the WJC reveal their urgent efforts to both convey and obtain further information from relatives and friends abroad. These sources, written before the war had ended, thus provide a compelling and raw glimpse into Danish survivors’ early memories of ghetto life in Theresienstadt.

Preexisting social ties among Auschwitz prisoners support Holocaust survival

Survivor testimonies link survival in deadly POW camps, Gulags, and Nazi concentration camps to the formation of close friendships with other prisoners. To provide evidence free of survival bias on the importance of social ties for surviving the Holocaust, we study individual histories of 30 thousand Jewish prisoners who entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on transports from the Theresienstadt ghetto. We ask whether the availability of potential friends among fellow prisoners on a transport influenced the chances of surviving the Holocaust. Relying on multiple proxies of preexisting social networks and varying social-linkage composition of transports, we uncover a significant survival advantage to entering Auschwitz with a larger group of potential friends.

Theresienstadt Ghetto: Propaganda, Paintings, and Protest

Throughout history, art has been used to express, emote, and empathize. It has provided a lens to understand history beyond figures and statistics, through the eyes of the people. The aim of this research study was to conduct a case study analysis of an art movement that emerged from the Theresienstadt Ghetto as a protest movement against the endeavor by the Nazis to use the Jewish inmates and their work as a tool of propaganda during the Holocaust. This paper consists of two parts. First, a detailed discussion of the environment of Theresienstadt was presented to show its evolution from the Nazis’ deceptive intent to put forth the illusion that it was a haven for Jewish people to the deterioration of living conditions and the audacious birth of an artistic hub upon the initiative of the Jewish inmates. Second, an in-depth analysis of four key works of art created in Theresienstadt, namely Transport Arrival by Leo Haas, a sketch by Helga Weissova, The Song is Over by Pavel Fantl, and Film and Reality by Bedrich Fritta, showcased the extraordinary courageous spirit of the artists in optimizing the meager resources they had to fight against their oppressors.

“Don’t forget about self-help” the fight for disability rights in Austria in the 1920s and 1930s

As an organiser of self-help groups and a political activist, Austrian-Czech Jew Siegfried Braun (1893-1944) co-founded the early social movement oriented towards emancipation and internationality of persons with disabilities in Austria. In the 1920s, he co-founded the First Austrian Cripple Working Group, a self-help organisation. The aim of Braun and his colleagues was to move away from being considered objects of charity – a role imposed by the Austrian welfare policy. The organisation did not only demand compliance with contemporary equal and human rights but also actively organised peer counselling, representation, and regular employment in their own businesses. In the 1930s, Braun maintained an active and reflexive role despite the economically and politically difficult times leading to National Socialism. After 1938, he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and ghetto (today Terezín Memorial), where he organised educational programmes as a form of resistance, before he was murdered in Auschwitz.

Fella Feige Drut

This article is the story of Fella Feige Drut, who was born in Rovno, Ukraine in 1923 and who in 1939, at the age of 16, was arrested by the Gestapo in Würzburg, Germany because she was Jewish. She survived six years in various concentration camps and work camps, eventually ending up in the Theresienstadt ghetto. Here, she gave birth to a daughter. Her ordeal and that of her close family members are reconstructed using documents from the International Tracing Service’s (ITS) archive and from other sources. Unlike many of her co-religionists, whose family life ended during the Nazi years (1933-1945), Fella Feige Drut was able to live on. Her resolve manifested itself in her fight for compensation from the German government for herself and her daughter, despite the bureaucratic hurdles placed in her way, and her resolution to leave Germany and to build a new life in the USA.

Just West of East: The Paradoxical Place of the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Policy and Perception

Abstract When German authorities established the Theresienstadt Ghetto for Bohemian and Moravian Jews in late 1941, the site initially functioned much like other ghettos and transit camps at the time, as a mere way station to sites of extermination further East. The decision to reconfigure the ghetto as a site of internment for select “privileged” groups of Jews from Germany and Western Europe, and its advertisement as a “Jewish settlement” in Nazi propaganda, constituted an apparent paradox for a regime that sought to make the Greater German Reich “judenrein” (clean of Jews). This article investigates the Theresienstadt Ghetto from a historical-spatial perspective and argues that varying prejudices and degrees of antisemitism shaped divergent “spatial solutions” to segregate Jews from non-Jews, wherein the perceived divide between so-called “Ostjuden” and assimilated Western Jews played a central role. In this analysis, Theresienstadt emerges as a logical culmination to paradoxical policies designed to segregate select groups of German and assimilated Western European Jews.

Just West of East: The Paradoxical Place of the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Policy and Perception

Abstract When German authorities established the Theresienstadt Ghetto for Bohemian and Moravian Jews in late 1941, the site initially functioned much like other ghettos and transit camps at the time, as a mere way station to sites of extermination further East. The decision to reconfigure the ghetto as a site of internment for select “privileged” groups of Jews from Germany and Western Europe, and its advertisement as a “Jewish settlement” in Nazi propaganda, constituted an apparent paradox for a regime that sought to make the Greater German Reich “judenrein” (clean of Jews). This article investigates the Theresienstadt Ghetto from a historical-spatial perspective and argues that varying prejudices and degrees of antisemitism shaped divergent “spatial solutions” to segregate Jews from non-Jews, wherein the perceived divide between so-called “Ostjuden” and assimilated Western Jews played a central role. In this analysis, Theresienstadt emerges as a logical culmination to paradoxical policies designed to segregate select groups of German and assimilated Western European Jews.

Paediatrics in Theresienstadt ghetto.

The main objective of this study is to describe the most common childhood diseases occurring in the Theresienstadt ghetto during the Second World War as well as applied anti-epidemic measures. A partial objective is to describe medical and nursing care of sick child prisoners. The data was obtained by the method of synthesis of primary and secondary data with the highest importance after adequate external source criticism using selected monographs, memoirs, survivor diaries, Orders of the day by the Council of the Elders and Reports of the Jewish self-government of the Theresienstadt ghetto from 1941 to 1945, the Archives of the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Ghetto Museum, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Post Bellum online electronic collection of oral historical interviews, and witness accounts. The validity of the presented conclusions is ensured by comparing data from several sources. The most common infections in Theresienstadt children were enteritis, scarlet fever, infectious jaundice, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, black cough, pneumonia, otitis media, and typhoid fever. Most of these infections had entirely atypical symptomatology or complications. Children were hospitalized in children's hospitals, in children's rooms of hospitals for adults and infirmaries in children's homes. Albeit diagnostic methods had a high standard, options of treatment were very limited. The most common treatments included bed rest, diet and cold compress. Occasionally, chemotherapeutic agents (e.g. a sulphonamide drug Prontosil) and Aspirin were available. The anti-epidemic measures in the ghetto focused on hygiene, enhancing children's immunity, vaccination and pest control.

Ethnography and the empathic imperative: Negotiating histories in the Sydney Brundibár Project

The children’s opera Brundibár received fame through performances by Jewish children in the Theresienstadt ghetto from 1943 to 1944. Since its revival in the 1970s, the work has been performed around the world in multiple languages and has been transformed into a best-selling book by Tony Kushner and Maurice Sendak. Used as a tool for Holocaust education, many modern productions emphasize a narrative of cultural resistance as a way of reading the work, transforming Brundibár’s Brechtian agitprop plot of collective action profoundly. In the Sydney production of 2014, a decision was made to stay faithful to the original motives of the composer and librettist, and the production was shaped by ethnographic testimony of those who had witnessed the original performances. This article examines how the historical narrative interacts with the ethnographic and personal encounters in the interpretation and realization of this work. Burdened by a responsibility to historical context, how does ethnography assist in bringing nuance and multi-vocality? In what way does an empathic imperative inform these processes?

The Fate of 435 Jewish Individuals Deported from Dresden to Theresienstadt between 1942 and 1944

Making Germany Judenfrei (free of Jews) or Judenrein (purified of Jews) was one of the pillars of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in Germany. One means of achieving this from 1941 onwards was the deportation of Jewish people to ghettoes or death camps in the occupied territories, primarily Poland, but also including Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic) where the Theresienstadt Ghetto was located.As part of this criminal act, 435, mainly elderly Jews were deported from Dresden to the Theresienstadt from 1942 to 1944. Using the personal information shown on the Gestapo deportation lists, this study shows that new facts about the fate of these people can emerge when the information provided is analysed on a group basis. It can also corroborate information provided elsewhere. For example, the extremely high death rate (87%) suffered by these people from Dresden echoes the overall death rate of 84% given by Yad Vashem for the 118,000 unfortunate individuals who were in the Ghetto and either perished there or perished elsewhere1. This demonstrates that a close analysis of one group of people can reveal corroborative knowledge about the Holocaust, and can provide starting point for comparative studies of the experiences of other deportees in different locations.

Nursing in the Theresienstadt Ghetto

In the context of the reality of life in the Theresienstadt ghetto, especially after it was designated as a ghetto for the old, this article focuses on the work of the nurses, both those who had qualified as nurses before their arrival and those who gained their practical training there. It looks at the relationships between nurses from different backgrounds and origins, seeking insights into these women’s experiences in the extreme conditions of the ghetto. It asks about the value of their struggle to save life, despite their awareness of the inevitable end. In conclusion, it will try to explain the absence of nurses from the epic of the Holocaust and especially from the history of the Theresienstadt ghetto.

Guilty Memories: Remembering the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Concentrationary Theatre

Abstract One of the issues theatre must deal with when approaching the topic of genocide is representation. How can theatre, an art of mimesis, represent extreme violence, absolute evil? What can be shown, so as to honour the memory of the victims and at the same time convey the idea of radical evil? At the turn of the 21st century, two playwrights, Enzo Cormann (France) and Juan Mayorga (Spain) approached the issue of the Holocaust through memory. In Toujours l’orage [Always the Storm](1997) and respectively Himmelweg [Way to heaven] (2002) the protagonists revisit, after several decades, the traumatic events of 1944, when they witnessed or participated in the perversion of life and theatre by the Nazi. This paper will analyse the modalities of the memorial mechanism, among which the metatheatrical devices facilitating the representation of the traumatic event.

III.1. Savoir et se taire ? Le Comité international de la Croix-Rouge et la Shoah

As early as the end of WWII, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was condemned for its response to the Holocaust. The world’s oldest humanitarian institution was primarily criticised for its silence. The ICRC did not publicly denounce the deportation of Jewish civilians to concentration and extermination camps. Because the organisation appeared to know what was happening in these places, its silence was all the more condemnable. Knowing and yet remaining silent was considered a sign of cowardice and passivity—and even of willing complicity with the perpetrators. A series of events, including the visit of the ICRC to the Theresienstadt Ghetto and the issuance of travel documents to war criminals, only served to underscore the criticisms against the Genovese organisation.This article seeks to examine both sides of the issue. It begins with an explanation of how the ICRC functioned during WWII and a discussion of the differences between the headquarters in Geneva and operations in the field. It then lists the criticisms, both justified and unfounded, that have been leveled against the ICRC for its silence before examining the relevance of each accusation. The article’s preliminary conclusion points to reasons as to why the term “silence” became so closely associated with the ICRC.

Medicine in Theresienstadt

Illness was a defining experience for prisoners of Nazi concentration camps and ghettos, and yet their medical history is missing; a startling lacuna, given the extensive research into medicine and the Holocaust. This article studies the medical staff, patients and diseases in the Theresienstadt ghetto. In examining medical care in extremis, it studies how the Central European Jewish doctors succeeded in providing comparably excellent health care for the inmates. The article studies the mentality, experience and the gendered power mechanisms that characterised the medical staff, the agency of the doctors as well as the hierarchies they assigned to patients. Finally, in exploring how the prisoner physicians made sense of Theresienstadt as a part of their medical career, I show what kind of historical protagonists are doctors.

‘Like Seeing Normal Life’: children’s opera Brundibár in Theresienstadt (1943–1944) and the power of scenographic metaphors

ABSTRACTCzech architect-scenographer František Zelenka was a well-known pre-war designer for the National Theatre in Prague, deported by the Nazis to the Theresienstadt ghetto, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, where he participated extensively in the inmates’ theatrical activity. Among his works in the ghetto, the children’s opera Brundibár, designed and directed by Zelenka, stands out. Brundibár was originally created in 1938 by the Czech Jewish composer Hans Krása and the librettist Adolf Hoffmeister in Prague. Despite the harsh living conditions, 55 performances are known to have been held in Theresienstadt between 1943 and 1944. The staging of Brundibár consisted of visual statements that were an integral part of the scenography and acquired meaning in the context of the ghetto. This article analyses Zelenka’s scenography by focusing on the visual metaphors embedded in the stage images he created, and offers an insight on the multiple roles of Brundibár’s original scenography and its impact. The aim is to underscore the power in creating and reading scenographic images under coercive conditions, with Brundibár as a paradigmatic example. It demonstrates the ways in which scenography may serve as a reminder of normality for children dealing with issues that cannot otherwise be confronted. The article concludes with a brief commentary on contemporary adaptations of the opera.

Lisa Peschel: Performing Captivity, Performing Escape. Cabarets and Plays from the Terezín / Theresienstadt Ghetto.

Jonas Mirbeth's review of Lisa Peschel's monograph Performing Captivity, Performing Escape. Cabarets and Plays from the Terezin / Theresienstadt Ghetto

Else Dormitzer’s Theresienstädter Bilder (1945)

The year 2015 marks the 70th anniversary of Else Dormitzer’s publication Theresienstadter Bilder, a collection of German-language poetry written during the author’s imprisonment in the Theresienstadt ghetto. By analyzing the modalities and discursive entanglements that constitute the hybrid nature of poetic texts produced by prisoners in Theresienstadt, I show how Dormitzer’s poetry from the Holocaust can be read within a testimonial framework and outside of it, and why such a reading is important.

Approaching Death: ‘Last Writing’ from the Terezín Ghetto

The Theresienstadt ghetto, a place called the ‘anteroom to hell’ by its inmates, was a space of writing in extremis. A daily life of suffering brought forward distinct ways of coming to terms with and working against the constant presence of death. While most private poetry and also letters followed a poetics of realism in order to grasp ‘Überleben’ rather than ‘Leben’, writing aimed at larger audiences sought to provide spaces of normality. Lectures and cabaret performances thus offered illusion and escape, both for performers and audience. Some works from the ghetto, such as Der Kaiser von Atlantis, also point to the danger of writing as harmless outlet for resistance, precluding necessary action. This article thus situates Theresienstadt’s writing in extremis between ‘spiritual survival’, ‘Resistenz’, and call for action.

Call for Papers: The Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship

Previous articleNext article FreeCall for Papers: The Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist ScholarshipPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe University of Chicago Press is pleased to announce the competition for the 2015 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship. Named in honor of the founding editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the Catharine Stimpson Prize is designed to recognize excellence and innovation in the work of emerging feminist scholars.The Catharine Stimpson Prize is awarded biennially to the best paper in an international competition. Leading feminist scholars from around the globe will select the winner. The prizewinning paper will be published in Signs, and the author will be provided an honorarium of $1,000. All papers submitted for the Stimpson Prize will be considered for peer review and possible publication in Signs.Eligibility: Feminist scholars in the early years of their careers (fewer than seven years since receipt of the terminal degree) are invited to submit papers for the Stimpson Prize. Papers may be on any topic that falls under the broad rubric of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship. Submissions must be no longer than 10,000 words (including notes and references) and must conform to the guidelines for Signs contributors. Guidelines for submission are available at http://www.jstor.org/page/journal/signs/instruct.html.Deadline for Submissions: March 1, 2014.Please submit papers online at http://signs.edmgr.com. Be sure to select Major Article-Stimpson Prize as the article type when submitting and to indicate submission for consideration for the prize in the cover letter. Please send any inquiries to [email protected]. The honorarium will be awarded upon publication of the prizewinning article.Congratulations to Anna Hájková, winner of the 2013 Catharine Stimpson Prize, for her essay “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” which appears in the Spring 2013 issue of Signs. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 39, Number 2Winter 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/674895 Views: 81Total views on this site © 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Call for Papers: The Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship

Previous articleNext article FreeCall for Papers: The Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist ScholarshipPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe University of Chicago Press is pleased to announce the competition for the 2015 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship. Named in honor of the founding editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the Catharine Stimpson Prize is designed to recognize excellence and innovation in the work of emerging feminist scholars.The Catharine Stimpson Prize is awarded biannually to the best paper in an international competition. Leading feminist scholars from around the globe will select the winner. The prizewinning paper will be published in Signs, and the author will be provided an honorarium of $1,000. All papers submitted for the Stimpson Prize will be considered for peer review and possible publication in Signs.Eligibility: Feminist scholars in the early years of their careers (fewer than seven years since receipt of the terminal degree) are invited to submit papers for the Stimpson Prize. Papers may be on any topic that falls under the broad rubric of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship. Submissions must be no longer than 10,000 words (including notes and references) and must conform to the guidelines for Signs contributors. Guidelines for submission are available at http://www.jstor.org/page/journal/signs/instruct.html.Deadline for Submissions: March 1, 2014.Please submit papers online at http://signs.edmgr.com. Be sure to indicate submission for consideration for the Catharine Stimpson Prize. The honorarium will be awarded upon publication of the prizewinning article.Congratulations to Anna Hájková, winner of the 2013 Catharine Stimpson Prize, for her essay “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” which appears in the Spring 2013 issue of Signs. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 38, Number 3Spring 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/668625 Views: 138Total views on this site © 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.