Sunday Feb 24th, I visited a WWII concentration camp for the very first time.

There are many thoughts going through my mind to tell people what it is like, but I honestly cannot explain the feeling I had walking through it.

I’ll start from the beginning of the day, though. A coupleof  friends of mine and I took a bus to Terezin, a concentration camp about an hour outside of Prague. We got there early in the day and started at the museum in the town.

Terezin, originally named Theresienstadt, was a fortress back in the late 1700’s. It is surrounded by a brick wall and was made to protect people. At one point, the town was used as a political prison camp. Then, during WWII, it became a ghetto and a concentration camp. It was a place for Czechoslovakian Jews, but it held other European Jewish people there as well. More than 150,000 Jewish people were sent to Terezin during the war.

The walls inside the front rooms of the museum were covered with names on the walls. Names of all the children who either died in Terezin or continued on to other concentration camps and died in the other camps. Many went to Auschwitz, and very few lived. We watched a video where a man listed off how many people left the camp to go to others. Most of the time, he would say numbers like, “twenty thousand sent to Auschwitz, only three survived.” It really hit me hard because it seemed like hours of him listing the number of people dying.

There were drawings everywhere. Drawings of what the Jewish people’s lives were like before the war, and what they were like during their time spent in the camps. These drawings were from the Jews in Terezin or Auschwitz. They were like seeing the camps through the eyes of those who were forced to live in them. I looked at and read about each and every one.

I felt sick to my stomach.

We spent a good amount of time looking at every picture and reading them all. Matt and I spent the most time inside the museum, really taking everything in.

We walked around the Ghetto, which is now a town where people live (kind of strange to me), and saw the living conditions that many people had to deal with. Around 33,000 people died in the ghetto alone. Matt and I were talking about how we were freely walking through what so many people would have called “their living hell.”

We then moved on to the concentration camp.

It was about a 7-minute walk to the camp from the walls of the ghetto. It went by fast.

Outside of the camp, all you could see was grave after grave after grave. They were almost all just numbers, not even a name.

We walked through the gates and were able to get an amazing tour guide. I wish I could explain walking through the actual concentration camp, but I really cannot. My mind is still just jumbled with how to express how depressing and disturbing the living conditions were. The rooms were the size of the picture below (I am standing up against the wall), and held 60 to 90 people. They slept directly on the wooden bed,s and all shared one bathroom that was located in the same room with windows that did not open. I wanted to throw up.

We went inside a room with dirt as the floor, and it was where people who were being punished had to live. It was about the size of a large dining room; 60 people were put in there at a time. They had to sleep standing up and go to the restroom on the floors because there was no bathroom in there. We figured it was big enough for maybe 16 people to sleep on the floor lying down.

Again, I felt sick.

Reading about these camps is one thing, but actually walking through one and seeing what people lived in and died in is a very different story.

I wish I could write down what every room looked like and the feelings I had while being there, but it was such a personal experience and indescribable.

I am glad I took the time to go, and I am going to Auschwitz sometime in April. I think that it was important for me to see Terezin first because it was smaller and helped prepare me for touring Auschwitz. It was also the order that many people went in (from Terezin to Auschwitz), so I think it was important for me to visit Terezin first.