Terezín Memorial - Ghetto Museum

Gain entry to 3 of the main historical sites of the Terezin Memorial and learn about the historical events which took place here during WWII and the people who were affected. Visit the Small Fortress, where a guided tour is included, and the Ghetto Museum and the Magdeburg Barracks in the Terezin Ghetto. Start the tour at the Small Fortress outside of the ticket office where you meet your tour guide. From 1940 to 1945 the Small Fortress served as the prison of the Prague Gestapo. Visit the permanent exhibition that is devoted to the history of the political prison; it bears witness to the persecution of the Czech nation under the Nazi regime during the Second World War and records the fates of Czech prisoners transferred to other concentration camps within the Nazi German Reich. Afterward, make your way to the former Terezin Ghetto where the Magdeburg Barracks and Ghetto Museum are located. The Ghetto Museum is located in the former municipal school and you will see there the Permanent exhibition: Terezín in the Final Solution, 1941-1945. In addition to this documentary exhibition, there is also a Memorial Hall of the Terezín Ghetto’s Children, devoted to its youngest victims, plus a selection from the world-famous drawings made by children from the Ghetto. The Magdeburg Barracks was established in Terezín on November 24, 1941. After the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands, the Magdeburg Barracks played a particularly important role in the Ghetto. The Barracks housed the offices of the different departments of the Ghetto’s so-called Jewish self-administration, as well as flats of some of the Ghetto’s leading officeholders. The Magdeburg Barracks were though also known as a venue of major cultural events, divine services, lectures, and meetings. The Crematorium, Terezín Jewish Cemetery, and Columbarium are located approximately 1,5 kilometers by walk from the Terezin Ghetto and no entrance ticket is required.

Terezin was a concentration camp about 1 hour north of Prague in the Czech Republic during World War II. By 1940 Nazi Germany had assigned the Gestapo to turn Terezín into a Jewish ghetto and concentration camp. It held primarily Jews from Czechoslovakia, as well as tens of thousands of Jews deported chiefly from Germany and Austria, as well as hundreds from the Netherlands and Denmark. More than 150,000 Jews were sent there, including 15,000 children. Later, most of these people have been sent by rail transports to their deaths at Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps in occupied Poland. This visit is essential to understanding the complicated history that unfolded here in 1941, when the region’s Jewish communities were deported through Terezin to death camps. It is also extremely relevant to understand what happened to so many innocent people through actual artifacts, children’s drawings, poetry, and other rare items which survived their owners to speak so eloquently for them. Terezin was completely different psychologically and physically from any of the 632 other camps.