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Theresienstadt
The Constant Eye Vol.2 by Paul Hardy Carter
The Constant Eye Vol.2
by Paul Hardy Carter
Theresienstadt
From left: Washing facilities, large cell; Guardhouse; Solitary confinement block
T
his has been one of the world’s dark places. A place
where humanity has faced the limits of its deep internal
inhumanity. There are many, far too many, such places around
the world. Some places are bloodier, more drenched in man’s
visceral savagery, than others. But all these places have something in common. Something that hangs over them like a lingering silence in the middle of a symphony.
Things have happened in these places that I and – I sincerely hope – most of us might be aware of, perhaps even
imagine the horror of, but can never truly comprehend. The
things men can do to others when placed in a particular set
From left: Sergeant-of-the-guard’s office; Guardhouse; Prison office
Above: A large cell. Facing page top: Disinfection room. Facing page bottom and right: Solitary confinement cells.
From left: Solitary cell; Sergeant-of-the-guard’s office; Solitary cell
of circumstances. When they, as men, are degraded to such an
extent that they see their debasement of others as normal.
Mundane. Just a job. Part of the daily routine.
Theresienstadt had its small role to play in the carnal madness that gripped Europe by the throat during the twentieth
century’s early decades. The Nazi’s vile system for the deportation and murder of European Jews used Theresienstadt as
a hub, and this gives the place its macabre celebrity. Over
140,000 Jews from various nations were forced through the
town between 1942 and 1945. Up to 50,000 lived here at one
time, in a town that had been fully occupied by just 7,000 people before the war. The hellish conditions, overcrowding, starvation, disease and brutality of the ghetto killed 33,000 people,
almost half of them children. There were 17,247 people still
alive when the town was handed over to the Red Cross on
May 1st 1945. The grim mathematics are stomach churning to
do, but one must ask: where are the 90,000 people who did
not succumb to the regime of the ghetto, and yet were not
among those found by the Red Cross?
Auschwitz.
From left to right: Large cell, solitary confinement cell, washing
facilities in the solitary confinement block.
And yet, and yet, this is not the full story of Theresienstadt in
those years. For instance, there was an unusually high proportion of artists, writers and musicians among the damned.There is
the music that was written and performed in this stifling ghetto,
which includes an opera. There are the paintings and the poetry,
the plays. There’s the Nazi documentary film made about the
town, actually made by a forced labour production team of
inmates – all subsequently moved on, through that hideous and
meticulous transportation system, to Auschwitz.
From left: Solitary cell; Disinfecting equipment; Large cell
Above: Solitary confinement cell. Facing page left: Solitary confinement cell. Facing page right: Disinfection room.
Left and right: The prison infirmary.
And even yet the story of the Nazi era isn’t finished, for when
the Hapsburgs built Theresienstadt at the end of the eighteenth
century as a fortified garrison town, they also built another
smaller fortress alongside. This was to be a military prison, and
such was its function for many years. And then Stellvertretender
Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo, found it
a century and a half later. He was setting up the Reich’s terror
network in Bohemia and Moravia, and he knew he had found the
perfect hub for his web. Horror central.
T
he prison in the Small Fortress was not built with aesthetics
in mind. This is functional, military-engineer-designed architecture, equipped with everything necessary for the operation
of a prison at the blunt end, the brutal end, of a system of state
terror and repression. Under the Gestapo, this was not the sort
of prison you would be sent home from with a “sorry, you’re
clearly innocent, we got the wrong man”. If you left here alive, it
was in a cattle truck.
Large prison cells
Facing page: Cell block exteriors. Above: Swimming pool installed for the comfort and entertainment of the SS guards and their families.
Left to right: Tunnel to the execution yard; Cell block exterior; Watch tower built during the Nazi era.
There are large cells for holding male and female prisoners
separately, solitary confinement cells, and torture cells. And the
Nazis built more, even larger, cells.
There is the chilling sergeants office, with its filing system to
keep track of all those troublesome ‘units’ sent to the prison by
the state security police. There is the disinfection room, to keep
the rampant contagious diseases down to an acceptable level.
What you see is the penultimate stop on a journey that starts
with the midnight knock on an apartment door in Prague. A
shocked and tearful wife, screaming children. A man, hurriedly
dressed. Manhandled from door to car to police cell. Interrogated, brutalised, humiliated, then sent on down the line To the
Small Fortress.
In the cell complex, in the dead silence, I can hear the clanging
of doors, the stamping of boots, the barking of orders, and the
screams. I can hear the sergeant, alternatively laughing at his own
jokes and then terrifying those over whom he has complete and
utter power.
These old buildings have some nobility, like dumb witnesses.
Now crumbling, they point at the perpetrators, singling them
out: what you did has not been forgotten, they say. As long as we
stand those who come here will know what you did.
N
ext to the large prison cells is the prison infirmary. Primo
Levi writes in If This is a Man, his memoir of Auschwitz, that
time spent in the sick-bay was a blessed relief from the crippling physical work that filled the prisoner’s daylight hours, but
brought other horrors. Released from the constant struggle to
do the work, and thereby to survive, the body gave the mind the
energy to think. The thoughts come unstoppably, Levi says. Why
are they doing this? How can they do this? On a normal day
his thoughts are unconcerned with anything beyond surviving
the next few minutes, but given a day or two without beatings
and unbearable physical demands, the questions come. And the
answers are unsatisfactory. Why are they doing this? Because it’s
their job. How can they bestialize other human beings to such an
extent that their very existence becomes meaningless? Because
this has become normality for them.
Facing page: Top left: Garden square in the Large Fortress. Lower Left: Barrack block in the Large Fortress. Right: Small Fortress moat.
Above: Moat around the Large Fortress.
Facing page: Top: Garrison Church. Bottom: Barrack block in the large fortress.
Above: The way out. In 1944 the Nazis used slave labour to build a branch line into the Large Fortress, to facilitate the more efficient movement of the ‘transports’.
Below and right Buildings in the Large Fortress show the scars of the years.
I
n 2001 a man called Anton Malloth was convicted of murder
in Munich. He had avoided justice for fifty-five years, protected
by the sinister Stille Hilfe organisation. Stille Hilfe, which translates
as “Silent Help”, is run by a lady whose married name is Gudrun
Burwitz. Gudrun Burwitz is Heinrich Himmler’s daughter.
Malloth, or “beautiful Toni” as he was known at the time, was
an SS sergeant in the Small Fortress. He was finally convicted of
a degraded crime, but in this context a typical one. He beat a
Jewish prisoner to death for going straight to his cell at the end
of his shift as a slave labourer, and not reporting to Malloth first.
It was a symbolic conviction. The disgusting Malloth had, according to witnesses, beaten to death approximately one hundred
prisoners in these cells. Frau Burwitz and her friends had successfully kept Malloth out of court until most of the survivors
of the prison had died, but one brave Czech man came forward,
and the case was made.
This spread: Life goes on in the modern city of Terezin.
The question of whether an old man should be put to trial
for an offence committed half a century earlier is, in my view,
irrelevant. This was an unrepentant man. It was pointed out at
the trial that he was not the kind of SS man who had drifted
into Himmler’s legions, as so many others had. He was a willing
volunteer. Someone who had truly found his ghastly métier, who
relished the opportunity to exercise the power of life and brutal
death over other human beings, on a whim.
This is the kind of man who walked these halls. Sat in these
offices. The kind of man whose immaculately uniformed silhouette in a cell doorway made other men – better, braver men –
shudder in fear.The kind of man who liked to share a few bottles
of schnapps with his colleagues at the end of the day, to have a
laugh, maybe even take a swim in the pool on a warm summer
afternoon.
And this is also the kind of man for whom there are willing helpers today. Standing in the shadows, offering money and
This spread: Inhabitants of the Large Fortress.
assistance, a nice place to live, in today’s Germany. The democratic, liberal Germany of the 21st century. They help him – not
out of kindness, because he is an old man in need, in spite of who
he is – but because of who he is. For these people he is a hero.
There are not many of these people, but they are there still, to
this day. And their queen is Gudrun Burwitz.
T
his town, that Emperor Josef II of Austria founded and named
in honour of his mother Maria Theresa, is now called Terezín.
At first sight it seems astonishing, distasteful even, that there
are people who call this place home. But why shouldn’t they?
The world turns and life moves forward. At least, by re-claiming
some of the town for their families, these people are placing the
diseased and bloody period where it belongs, in the past.
This is hardly the only former ghetto in central Europe: Budapest, Krakow, Lublin, Lviv, Warsaw, the list goes on. In most cases
the centres of these cities became lethally overcrowded prisons
for the Jewish population during the Nazi era, yet now each is a
part of a thriving modern city. Indeed, often the old ghetto areas
are on the sightseeing map, tourists admire the quaint beauty of
the buildings that once held inconceivable numbers of people.
There is also a certain charm about this 18th century model
municipality. It is far from ugly. The well proportioned buildings,
the wide cobbled streets, the open squares, all lend a certain
elegance. But most importantly there is life here. There are families and children. We can hope for a bright future for Terezín, but
we must never forget the blackness of the past.
Facing page: Litomerice. Above: River Ohre
About the Photographer
Paul Hardy Carter
A
fter studying photography as a student in the
early 1980s Paul Hardy Carter realised that
constantly having a camera in front of his face was
no way to see the world. Following three years of
intense picture taking he put his camera down and
didn’t pick it up again for fifteen years.
Since 2002, when photography reclaimed him, he has worked
within certain self-imposed guidelines: he always shoots 35mm
black and white film, uses a standard 50mm lens, and ambient
light. He never sets-up a shot, or crops an image. He believes
that by applying this criteria to his work he achieves a consistency of vision that easily justifies the sacrifice of a more flexible
approach.
The familiar ratio of the negative, three by two, becomes
a window that the photographer carries around with him,
through which to view the world and record some of its life, its
joys and its tribulations.
This constant view means the body of his work can be seen
in a certain context. The appearance of a room is not altered
by the distortion of wide angle perspective – compositional
elements are not pulled together by the use of a telephoto. It
means the viewer’s eye can move from one picture to the next
and view not just individual images, but a succession of them.
The pictures in this book were all taken in the space of a few
hours, but pictures taken thousands of miles away, and years
later, will still fit the same consistent perspective.
Paul visited Terezín in the northern Czech Republic in
November 2003. During the previous year the area had been
badly damaged by the flooding that affected large parts of central Europe, and reconstruction work was being carried out.
The timing of his visit, however accidental, added poignancy to
the pictures in this book. Signs of flood damage can be seen
in several of the pictures, but the tragic drama enacted in this
place almost sixty years before is the central character here.
Terezín, as it is now called in Czech, was built as a fortified garrison town by the Hapsburg empire at the end of the
eighteenth century, and named Teresienstadt. It consisted of two
fortresses, referred to as the Große Festung, or Large Fortress,
comprising the actual town, and the Kleine Festung, or Small
Fortress, which was used as a military and political prison from
the beginning. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as
the strategic importance of the fortifications diminished, its use
as a prison increased to the point, during the First World War,
when it was the main function of the fortress. The Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip, whose assassination of the Hapsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 had sparked the war, was held in
the harsh conditions of the Small Fortress until his death from
tuberculosis in April1918, in cell number 1.
With the annexation of Czechoslovakia by Germany in 1938
the fortress fell under the control of the Nazis.