n the barracks the children lived under the authority of the leaders. How much was this framework able to serve as a substitute for the family unit and which jobs did the leaders take upon themselves? We will study this through the eyes of the children and the way in which they expressed themselves as they described their leaders
Activity
Read the next 3 sources. Afterwards, fill out the graph.
In Column A, write the name of the madrich or madricha whom the text refers to. In Column B, indicate which figure, in your opinion, they are replacing: a father, a mother, a grandfather, a brother, disciplinarians, storytellers, friends or teacher etc. In Column C, indicate whether, in your opinion, the madrichim succeeded in providing the child with a sense of the figure they were replacing.
| The madrich or madricha (name if there is one) |
The figure that the madrich or madricha is replacing |
Does the madrich or madricha provide a sense of the missing figure? |
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| |
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For the teacher
In Theresienstadt many children lived together in their own barracks.
The spirit of the youth movements served as a basis for the life in the barracks. In these barracks, the children were under the authority of their leaders, who, in many cases, were only a few years older than the children.
The Zionist ideology assumed a central position in these frameworks. The Zionist madrichim worked on promoting Zionist and pioneering values to the children. This world-view was foreign to many of them since they came from assimilated homes. Nevertheless, other ideological groups - political and religious - were active, reflecting various sectors of Czech Jewry and other groups in the ghetto.
The need to protect the children from the difficult reality in the ghetto led the Jewish leadership to separate the children from their parents. By doing so, they created an alternative to family life. The madrichim were responsible for the daily routine and the activities in the children's homes. Moreover, since the family framework had largely been dismantled, intimate emotions such as love, anger, and dependence, which had formerly been directed at the parents, were now directed at the madrichim.
For the Teacher
A substitute figure can often try to take the place of the person who is absent. Sometimes he/she can console and give hope, but he/she can never be that person. In fact, he/she often intensifies the pain created by the absence of the person.
Summary
Theresienstadt was not a ghetto in the ordinary sense of the word. It served as both ghetto and transit camp from which thousands were deported to concentration and extermination camps. Men, women and children were forced to deal with a daily reality of life in the shadow of death. They tried to keep the family framework despite the separation between the members of the family. They were forced to fight in order to get a bit of food, and in order to protect their privacy and preserve their humanity. The actual life in Theresienstadt, and not what the Nazis falsely presented, becomes more clear through reading the testimonies and stories of the children of Theresienstadt. The voice of the children shows us about how this place served as a source of life and hope alongside the pain, the loss and death.
Out of the 15,000 children that were in Theresienstadt, about 150 survived.
In these activities you read a variety of testimonies from the Theresienstadt ghetto that tell the story of the children in the Ghetto.
Yehuda Bacon describes through his dream the incredible distance between the home before the war, Theresienstadt, and Auschwitz:
"In Theresienstadt we dreamed ….I dreamt that I was back home, I dreamt that I would meet friends from class …. When we came to Auschwitz, we never dreamed about home anymore. The biggest dream was Theresienstadt".
