Vicki writes

(it’s too long to put in one post)

Terezín. 5 years. 32,000 prisoners. You don’t hear about it because it wasn’t the Dachau or Ravensbrück, or Auschwitz. But it was there. And for 32,000 people, it was hell.

Now you can walk through it in the gorgeous Czech summer, you can see the mass grave out front, each tombstone adorned with a rose-bush. You can see the courtyard where they entered, with the wickedly ironic slogan Arbeit Macht Frei on the portal. You can see the place where three men escaped—the only successful escapees. You can see where the prisoners lived in squalor, and where the Germans lived in the lap of luxury. And you can see the barracks for the less important Germans, now converted into a museum.

I knew Great-Grandpa was a German. I guess I knew he was a Nazi too. But nothing prepared me for the shock of seeing his name on the wall of the museum. The museum was divided into little rooms, with posters of information and pictures on the wall. And on the inside wall of each room, there was a painting of an agonized hand. The paintings were actually different in each room. Some of the hands were clutching something, some of them had Nazi symbols on them, some were bleeding…

One of the rooms had pictures and information about the Germans who worked at the concentration camp. The first was Heinrich Jöckell. He was the one in charge, and he was the worst. But there were others too, of course. I went around the room reading about the Germans, what they did (always described in the vaguest of terms), and how they were brought to justice. And then suddenly there was Great Grandpa, smiling down at me, informing me that he had never been punished. He had lived out his days quietly and pleasantly, the poster informed me.

There was something else in the camp, too. The camp wasn’t built as a concentration camp. It was built as a military fortress in the 1700s. And as such, it needed escape routes and places to shoot from. For this purpose there was an extensive tunnel system. It wasn’t used during the concentration camp days, but the tunnels were re-opened when the camp was turned into a memorial. Actually, only one of the tunnels was opened. The rest were grated off, so that over-curious tourists couldn’t wander in and get lost. But you knew the other tunnels were there, because that was where they put the lights. The main tunnel, the one the tourists were allowed to walk through, was 500 meters long. Other tunnels branched off it, and they put the lights a way back in the other tunnels, so the main tunnel was lighted but still dark.

I saw the tunnel first, before I went to the museum, but afterward the tunnel kept forcing its way back into my mind. If you could get over the grates—and I was confident I could—without anyone seeing you—of that I was less confident—you could potentially live there for quite some time without discovery. By the time our tour was done, and we were back on the bus to Tli?in, I was obsessed with the idea. Actually, two different ideas were sloshing around in my brain, bumping into each other, intertwining, tangling up, latching on, until they were absolutely inseparable. Great-Grandpa was never brought to justice. I could live in the tunnels probably indefinitely. Great-Grandpa worked at Terezín. I could live at Terezín. Great-Grandpa never atoned for his deeds. I could.

I’ll post the rest at a later date.