The Red Cross visits Theresienstadt, 70 years ago

Pastoral Theresienstadt

The infamous Red Cross visit to Theresienstadt took place 

June 23, 1944, that is, 70 years ago

In the Coffee House - Joe Spier 

Theresienstadt was established as a 'model ghetto', "in order to save face in regards to the outside world" (Eichmann). The first deportation to the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto too place Nov. 24, 1941.

While the Jews in Theresienstadt gave manifestation to the height of spiritual survival in the shadow of evil, it was, and was meant to be a hoax from the beginning.

The perversity of deception in the service of evil compounded into the dust of the extermination camps, but on the way, “to the East,” as the Nazis deceptively called the transports to the death camps, Theresienstadt served as a model of deception.

The Red Cross visited the 'town' on June 23, 1944, prior to which the Nazis intensified deportations, and the ghetto was "beautified." Some inmates were dressed up and told to stand at strategic places along the carefully designated route. Shop windows along the route were filled with goods for the day, and the day's abundance in the candy shop window made life in Terezin seem sweet.

The day of the visit, the orchestra stage at the town square

Children playing - also the day of the visit 

Not the day of the visit 

The Red Cross reported dryly that while war time conditions made all life difficult, life at Terezin was acceptable given all of the pressures. The Red Cross concluded that the Jews were being

treated

all right.

Inmates in Theresienstadt - also not the day of the visit 

Approximately 158,000 Jews were brought to Theresienstadt. Approximately 90,000 were transported onwards to the extermination camps, of whom about 4,800 survived. About 35,500 died of hunger and illness in the ghetto (among them my great-grandmother).

Of the 12,121 children (born 1928 and later) brought to Theresienstadt, 9,001 were sent to the death camps. 325 survived.

When Helen Deutsch, the psychoanalyst who had left Vienna for the United States in 1935, wrote her important 1942 paper “Some forms of emotional disturbance and their relationship to schizophrenia,” introducing the concept of the as-if personality, the poet Leo Strauss wrote, in Theresienstadt, what in its subtle simplicity to me is one of the most spectacular poems, ‘Als-Ob,’ As-If. The English translation from the German is mine, from Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return:

I know a little tiny town
A city just so neat
I call it not by name
but call the town As-if

Not everyone may enter

Into this special place
You have to be selected
From among the As-if race

And there they live their life
As-if a life to live
Enjoying every rumor
As-if the truth it were

You lie down on the floor
As-if it was a bed
And think about your loved one
As if she weren’t yet dead

One bears the heavy fate
As-if without a sorrow
And talks about the future
As if there was – tomorrow

Hitchcock’s horrendous Holocaust film

In Claude Lanzmann’s “The last of the unjust” we receive a rare glimpse into the perspective of Benjamin Murmelstein, the last head of the Jewish Council in Theresienstadt, whom many saw as a collaborator. Murmelstein comes across in all his complexity; a rabbi and intellectual, a learned scholar, knowledgeable but not fully reliable, telling his story, with conviction, exemplifying that all victims were martyrs, but not all martyrs were saints.

Theresienstadt. Women and children in prison uniforms.
Yad Vashem 

The cast of the children's opera Brundibar by Hans Krasa.
The opera was performed 55 times in Theresienstadt. 

“Memory of the Camps” is the unbearable horror ‘movie’, narrated by Trevor Howard, that Hitchcock could not bear himself to watch. It truly IS unbearable.

It forces disgrace on the coldest of evil, and shame on Holocaust denial.

From 'Memory of the Camps' 

After you watch it, I suggest you listen to Patrick Gordon Walker reporting from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. From the horrors of human evil and of human suffering, from the ashes of the mass-graves, spring the grains of Hope.

The Nazi evil of the Holocaust forced human beings to encounter the unimaginable, turning many of those who did survive the Shoah, that grand projection of shadow, of dehumanization, into mere silhouettes.

And yet, there were those that rose from the ashes, who fleshed out the silhouettes, who stepped out of the machinery of evil, forever wounded and scarred, yet embracing life.

Heart and the (Philosopher's) Stone in Prague

'Rooftops and Towers of Prague,' a drawing by
Petr Ginz, 1928-1944 (Yad vaShem).

Born in Prague, Petr spent his adolescence in the children's home in the Theresienstadt ghetto. He was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau in the fall of 1944. In 2003, Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut that perished in the space shuttle Columbia, took Petr Ginz's drawing 'Moon Landscape' (see below) with him from the Yad Vashem collection.

I had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Czech Society for Analytical Psychology, to deliver a lecture and a workshop on the Cycle of Life.

Following several years of experience with the impressive Bulgarian Jung Society, as well as visiting the groups in Poland, Estonia, and the Czech Republic, I can testify to the admirable devotion and seriousness found among the analysts, therapists and students in these countries. Their thirst for knowledge is a source of inspiration, and in only a few years the therapists in these countries have gained increasing psychotherapeutic experience.

It was a great joy to lecture to the members of the Czech Society, to an attentive audience of analysts and analysts to be, Jungian oriented therapists and students.

The weekend was particularly moving and meaningful because of Dvorah Kutzinski, who gave two related seminars – one on Erich Neumann’s Origins of Consciousness, and a seminar on Mozart’s The Magic Flute, including the screening of Bergman’s wonderful movie.

At 87, Dvorah Kutzinski, the Grand Old Lady of Jungian Analysts in Israel, is as sharp, witty and vital as ever. Coupled with her awareness of old age and death, she is full of life and energy, leaving many of us behind.

Her charismatic personality comes across in lectures and seminars, therapy and supervision, as her students, analysands and colleagues of more than fifty years will attest.

The person she is and her individual life are deeply intertwined with the history and culture of the 20th Century. She grew up in the house in which Kafka was born, with Max Brod, to whom we owe the preservation of Kafka’s manuscripts, among the weekly guests in their home. Her father, the philologist Prof. Zeckendorf, later one of the famous lecturers at Theresienstadt, predicted Kafka’s future long before his rise to fame.

After years in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, she arrived at the shores of Israel, and met Erich Neumann. She became a close friend and his foremost disciple, making his writings accessible to generations of Jungians. And the Czech she hasn’t spoken for seventy years, emerged from the depths of memory. She was received, as she so rightly deserves, with great warmth and appreciation.

Regarding the whereabouts and recent findings about the Golem of Prague, I have been sworn to silence and cannot yet disclose anything. It will have to remain shrouded in mystery, until it eventually will emerge from the hiding place in the shadows of science. Let me only mention that the story about the golem of Prague, based on the legend of the sixteenth century Rabbi Loew from Prague, was revived at the turn of the century by several authors, notably Gustav Meyrink. Meyrink had been a bank manager, before turning to alchemy and Kabbalah. He was convinced that the Philosopher’s Stone was to be found in the Prague sewer system, and from serious research into this matter, I have found conclusive evidence that the stone probably is to be found in the nigredo of Prague’s shadow.

The Jewish Cemetery in Prague

Petr Ginz, 'Moon Landscape' (Yad vaShem)