Terezin Concentration Camp

For one of my orientation trips I visited Terezin Concentration camp about an hour outside of Prague. There was a Jewish ghetto setup by Hitler to contain the Jews in the Czech republic. Propaganda praised him for giving them their own town, when it was an awful place of poverty. The police just picked people to send to the camp: Jews, thieves, gypsies. The Red Cross came to inspect the camp, but gave them months notice so they prepared to make it look like a spa town. They picked certain people and made sure they were well fed and trained to answer questions appropriately. I was disgusted to learn that after setting up football games and town events for show, all people involved were killed.
At one point during the tour we stopped at a smaller section of the security wall. Our tour guide told us that the guards were stationed here at all times, but one Christmas Eve when they were all drunk, three men climbed the wall and escaped. I stared at this wall with the silly wondering of how fast they had run. Somehow, after months of exhausting work and almost no food or sleep, they found the strength to escape. I wondered for the rest of the tour how exactly they found the will to live. Two of the men resurfaced later under different names and published work.
We went to a museum afterward and got to see tools the prisoners made, the buildings of the ghetto, and letters people wrote to loved ones. Learning about how the prisoners were thrown away so easily and without thought. This was a tragic place to be, but I will remember what I learned here, especially because I will be visiting Auschwitz in April.