During WWII it was a Nazi ghetto for Jews. Known as ‘the model ghetto’ or ‘the paradise ghetto’, thousands died there of starvation, disease and ill-treatment. Thousands more were shipped from there to Auschwitz to be murdered.
Despite the appalling conditions in Terezin, there was a vibrant cultural life. There were book clubs, discussion groups and theatrical and musical performances. Now a new element of that cultural life has been uncovered with the discovery of these notebooks.
Written in pencil, the notebooks contain a complete (and rather exciting) novel set during Roman times.
The book will be published next year.
Author’s Note
Transport Ep, as it was known, which left Theresienstadt on October 9th 1944 with 1,600 people on board, went to Auschwitz-Birkenau where it arrived on October 12th. As was the system, the men were separated from the women on arrival. Mothers with children, as well as the sick and aged, were taken immediately to the gas chamber and murdered. Several hundred people were admitted to the camp, including 181 women.
A little over two weeks later, on October 28th, a group of 500 women, 80 of them from Theresienstadt, were taken in cattle trucks to Austria where they were put to work, building roads and air raid shelters.
Of the original 1,600 people from transport Ep, 22 survived the war.
The last transport ever to run from Theresienstadt, transport Ev, left on October 28th1944. There were 2,038 people on it: 949 men and boys and 1,089 women and girls. The transport reached Auschwitz-Birkenau on October 30th. After the selection, 1,689 people were murdered in the gas chamber.
137 people from this final transport survived the war.
During the existence of the Paradise Ghetto, 139,654 people were deported there. 17,472 were eventually liberated from it.
207 children were born there. Most, if not all, would have been among the 86,934 deported to the Nazi death camps.
3,097 people returned from these transports. It is highly unlikely that any of those babies would have been among them.
The Paradise Ghetto had three commandants during its life.
Siegfried Seidl ran it from November 1941 until July 1943. After the war he was arrested and tried in Austria. He was sentenced to death and executed on February 4th 1947.
The second commandant, Anton Burger, ran the camp from July 1943 until February 1944. Arrested after the war, he escaped, was rearrested and escaped again. He died of natural causes on Christmas Day 1991. He never received any punishment.
The third and final commandant was Karl Rahm. He left Theresienstadt on May 5th 1945 along with the last of the SS personnel. He was captured shortly afterwards by American forces in Austria and extradited in 1947 to Czechoslovakia. Put on trial, Rahm was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. He was executed on April 30th 1947, four hours after his guilty verdict had been handed down by the Czech court.
Most of the children that can be seen in this clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP8eYTwmPt0
of the opera Brundibár were murdered in Auschwitz. They include Honza Treichlinger, the little guy with the moustache:
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=22652067.
The White Ship
Nick Salaman
The Tsar’s Dragons
Catrin Collier
In 1869, Tsar Alexander II decided to drag Russia into the industrial age. He began by inviting Welsh businessman John Hughes to build an ironworks.
A charismatic visionary, Hughes persuaded influential people to invest in his venture, while concealing his greatest secret – he couldn’t even write his own name. Hughes recruited adventurers prepared to sacrifice everything to ensure the success of Hughesovka (Donetsk, Ukraine). Young Welsh men and women fleeing violence in their home country, Jews who have accepted Russian anti-Semitism as their fate, and Russian aristocrats: all see a future in the Welshman’s plans.
For more information about Fergus O’Connell
and other Accent Press titles
please visit
www.accentpress.co.uk
© 2016 Fergus O’Connell
The right of Fergus O’Connell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The story contained within this book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Published by Accent Press Ltd 2016
Paperback ISBN: 9781786150431
Ebook ISBN: 9781786151438
The Paradise Ghetto Page 36