Terezin

Next stop was an infamous Nazi prison, named for the nearby town, which in turn was named for the Empress Maria Tereza. Converted from a military fort built to repel the Prussians, it held political and ideological prisoners, while the town itself was turned into a model Jewish ghetto tidy enough to fool the Red Cross into thinking it was a model of comfort and civility. The prison was grim and overcrowded, simply a stop for days or weeks on the way to the concentration camps. While many died here from torture, typhoid fever, and suffocation from being packed into airless cells, most were incinerated. The incinerators broke down toward the end, so there is a cemetery for bodies found in a mass grave in front of the prison.

The interior is pretty grim:

The notorious motto "work makes you free."

Statue "Pilgrim" by sculptor Jiří Sozansky

We stopped for lunch at the tiny hamlet of Horni where two archivists are raising three children in an enormous rambling old place that they are fixing up one room at a time. You can see they have their work cut out for them: