The first English-language edition of H. G. Adler's acclaimed account of the Jewish ghetto in the Czech city of Terezin.

"Theresienstadt was the Jewish ghetto (1941-45) created by the Nazis within the walled garrison town of Terezín, Czech Republic, to which many of Europe's Jewish cultural elite were deported, and where their artistic activities were allowed flourish despite the ghetto's hidden purpose as a prison and conduit to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Nazi concentration camps. Considered as a whole, the art of the Teresienstadt ghetto forms one of the most complex - and most neglected - bodies of work of the past century." -- Book cover.

Terezín, as it was known in Czech, or Theresienstadt as it was known in German, was operated by the Nazis between November 1941 and May 1945 as a transit ghetto for Central and Western European Jews before their deportation for murder in the East. Terezín was the last ghetto to be liberated, one day after the end of World War II. The Last Ghetto is the first in-depth analytical history of a prison society during the Holocaust. Rather than depict the prison society which existed within the ghetto as an exceptional one, unique in kind and not understandable by normal analytical methods, Anna Hájková argues that such prison societies that developed during the Holocaust are best understood as simply other instances of the societies human beings create under normal circumstances. Challenging conventional claims of Holocaust exceptionalism, Hájková insists instead that we ought to view the Holocaust with the same analytical tools as other historical events. The prison society of Terezín produced its own social hierarchies under which seemingly small differences among prisoners (of age, ethnicity, or previous occupation) could determine whether one ultimately lived or died. During the three and a half years of the camp's existence, prisoners created their own culture and habits, bonded, fell in love, and forged new families. Based on extensive archival research in nine languages and on empathetic reading of victim testimonies, The Last Ghetto is a transnational, cultural, social, gender, and organizational history of Terezín, revealing how human society works in extremis and highlighting the key issues of responsibility, agency and its boundaries, and belonging.

Through inmates' own voicesNfrom secret diary entries and artwork to excerpts from memoirs and recordings narrated after the warN"Terezin" explores the lives of Jewish people in one of the most infamous of the Nazi transit camps in Czechoslovakia. Illustrations.

When Adolf Hitler created the model camp at Theresienstadt for the better-known of Europe's Jewish transportees, he gathered together many of the continent's finest musicians. This book examines the associations, compositions, performances (opera, orchestras, chamber music, recitals) and above all, the people in Terezín. The Protectorate or Terezin Ghetto was not as bad as the concentration camps and it held Czech Jews and the best musicians of the times. After 3 1/2 years, in the fall of 1944, 1,000 Jews were transported from Terezin to Auschwitz to the gas chamber.

She has learned to forgive, but she can never forget. And neither can we.Gerty Spies was born in 1897 at Trier into a Jewish family whose ancestors had lived in Germany for centuries. Separated from her family by the Nazis, she was sent to the Czech camp known as Theresienstadt. It was a peculiar place: publicized as a retirement city, a Nazi propaganda showplace where Jews could sit out the war. But it was actually a way station for those destined for the Auschwitz death camp. Isolated from the outside world, surrounded by death, Spies retreated to her inner self to concentrate on human, cultural, and other values. Her powerful talent for writing, discovered at the camp, enabled her to transcend and triumph over mental and physical degradations; to keep her own integrity; to not let evil destroy her loving nature; and, finally, to not lose faith in humanity. By the end of the war, 33,000 people died in Theresienstadt from disease and malnutrition. Spies''s work exhibits a tension between the expression of camp reality and an imagination of an idealized past. Sensitive and humorous, but never bitter, her stories of the struggle for survival are expressions of her own individual moral poise.

An architect who made drawings of conditions at Therezienstadt reveals his experiences