FORT DE TEREZÍN (PEVNOST)

The fort of Terezín was built under Emperor Joseph II to protect the most important roads in the country during the Prussian-Austrian war in the th century. It has never really fulfilled this mission, but already at the beginning of the th century, under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and then under the first Czechoslovak Republic, Little fortress is used as a prison.
Only after the Second World War was Terezín known throughout the world and revealed his tragedy. The Nazis had made it a huge prison town, a transit camp and a decimation camp. Terezín was a real instrument of final solution and was also a propaganda object. A film, only carried out by the prisoners, was filmed in 1944: The Führer gives a city to the Jews (Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet). We see a "comfortable ghetto" with an opera built by prisoners, happy workers at the job and children leaving school. Most of the actors and members of the shooting team died a few months later. On 5 May 1945, shortly after the Prague uprising, guards fled Terezín, but, faced with the epidemic of typhus, the entire city became an immense infectious hospital (with the help of the Red Cross, Red Army, the Czech National Council, but also the detainees themselves) and was being quarantined. We must wait until late May for the Camp to be really released.