A total of roughly 15,000 children passed through the doors of Terezín Concentration Camp. Of these only about 100 children came back.
Contents
The Children of Terezín
The children who were brought to Terezín knew nothing of what their fates would be. They had come from places where they had already experienced and known humiliation. They had been expelled from the schools, forced to sew stars on their clothes, and were not allowed to play in places other than cemeteries. They were herded into Terezín with their parents. They were forced to sleep on concrete floors in crowded rooms or in three-tiered bunks. They soon began to understand the strange world they lived in. They saw reality of their situation, but maintained their childish outlook on life.
From the age of 14 the children of Terezín were forced to work as adults. They worked 80- to 100-hour weeks of hard manual labour. The Terezín children saw everything the adults saw. They saw all of the horrors that took place in their new home. They witnessed the transports coming and going constantly, taking their neighbors to their ultimate death. They saw the funeral carts used to carry their food and the people who pulled these carts like animals. They were witnesses to executions and other horrors that simply became a part of their everyday lives. These children were perhaps the only children in the world who captured what they saw, felt, heard, smelled, and tasted with a pencil and paper.
Secretly, these children studied and drew not only the horrors that they were silent witnesses to but also the beauty that only they, through their childish outlook on the world, saw. The children saw the beauty that was beyond the walls of their homes. They saw the animals, birds, green meadows, hills, and the highway leading away from the ghetto. The children also saw things that the adults could no longer imagine seeing. Terezín children saw princesses and princes, kings and queens, wizards and witches, everything their imagination could create. All of this and more, the children drew and wrote about. These children loved to paint and draw more than anything else in the world.
In addition to drawing and painting the children of Terezín wrote poems. These poems spoke of the fear and longing these children felt. The children of Terezín wrote about the longing they felt to go away somewhere where people were nicer and treated them like human beings. The children wrote about how much the wished they could go home, away from the horrible place of Terezín. Terezín's children knew, maybe even better than the adults, that they were condemned and they expressed it through their beautifully sad and heartbreaking poems.
Approximately 15,000 children passed through the doors of Terezín, and yet only about 100 children came back. For most of the children their deaths occurred in 1944 in Auschwitz concentration camp. The drawings, paintings, and poems that the children of Terezín did are all that survives as a reminder of who they were.
Terezín Concentration Camp
Terezín Concentration Camp
Children's Poems
Terezín Children's Cantana
Video
The Last Butterfly Video