Terezin Camp

It might not have been the day for it after hearing little about the London explosions and being stuck on the bus all day, but we decided to go ahead with it anyway and check out a former concentration camp on our way to Prague. When we arrived it was actually quite sunny which was a welcome change as our tour guide took us through the buildings. We started in the administration area then moved on through the prisoner's quarters. I was shocked at the living conditions. Three shelves of wide, wooden planks served as beds in a filthy concrete cell holding one hundred prisoners but barely able to accommodate ten "comfortably".

We walked through the showering room which was terribly spooky, just like in the movies where prisoners showered all at once from pipes hanging overhead. As if we weren't all spooked enough, the next thing we did was walk through a 500 metre tunnel used as part of the defense system when the place was a fortress. It led to what the Germans used as the execution area, where we were shown the place where prisoners stood and where they were shot from and even the gallow where three prisoners were hanged. Just as if the weather knew exactly when we were most unsettled, it began to pour down rain so we took shelter under a small passageway. Once that lightened we were shown a video I didn't quite understand. It kept showing video of the concentration camp while a voiceover spoke statistics on transfers to prisons and how many survived. It was horrible, normally around ten surviving from a thousand prisoners. An interesting tour but boy was I glad to be out of there and back on the bus.