The Route To Terezin

The route to Terezin is simple if you catch the bus. Terezin, a former concentration camp featured in the propaganda film “The Fuhrer Gives A Town To The Jews,” is located two hours outside of Prague, and for my mother and I, two Jews of the Queens, NY variety—think more Fran Drescher than Tevye of “Fiddler” fame—it was the place where we would learn the history behind the culture we had always loosely claimed.
But first, we missed the bus. After some hurried research, I found a website with mention of a train that went to Bohušovice nad Ohrí, a mile walk from Terezin. We ignored the site’s warning that this was not a tourist route and boarded a train headed for the remote countryside. And so it was, that on the road to self-discovery, we got lost—not in a poetic sense, literally.
After a rainy morning, the sky hung gray and grim above Bohušovice nad Ohrí, working alongside the empty streets to create a ghost town effect. We walked through without seeing so much as a silhouette through a window frame. We came to a curved road with endless fields of long grass on either side and walked for thirty minutes until it forked— one path continued on towards mountain peaks, the other into a forest. We tried one way, went back, tried the other and ended back at the fork. And then, from out of the forest, came Karel.
I ran up to him and said just the name—Terezin? In smooth English, he responded, “Yes, I grew up there.” Karel had studied abroad in Philly—he called sprinkles “jimmies”—lived in Prague, and was visiting home. He offered to show us around, and after some hesitation, we followed him into the woods.
We emerged in a beautiful town. Old buildings, wide roads, and lush courtyards—it was easy to see why the Nazis had picked it as their ghetto-for-show. But just beyond its borders, where Karel left us, we could see the barracks.
It was not a happy day. But we left Terezin—its museum filled with children’s art, its preserved camp grounds, its mass graves of “undesirables”—having gained a connection to our history that books had failed to provide. The route we had found ourselves lost on, was, as the website had warned, not a tourist route, but rather the way the Nazis had transported prisoners to the camp. On the way home, a woman pantomimed directions to help us find the bus. From the back window, we could see her waving to us until she disappeared, fading into the background of the town we had struggled to find and felt fortunate to leave.