The silences of Terezin – Balkan Insight

At the same time, Hajkova insists that exposing stories of sexual assault and homophobia is an overtly political act, clearly connecting to contemporary debates over #MeToo and LGBT.

In that, she could risk a backlash. Holocaust history has become something of a minefield in Central Europe, as right-wing regimes seek to mould narratives to suit their agenda.

Terezin sits just 60km from Poland, where the Law & Justice (PiS) government is pressing for tight control of WWII history including the Nazi death camps that were established in the country to mobilise support for its nationalist populism.

This push, which includes a Holocaust law criminalising claims that Poles engaged in any of the Nazis crimes, has put academics on the frontline. Historians straying from the official narrative have faced lawsuits, job losses and persecution in the press.

But the Czech approach to 20th century history is very different. Highly individualistic, Czech society is largely immune to the blood-and-soil rhetoric employed to promote nationalism elsewhere in the region, suggests Ondrej Klipa, an associate professor at Pragues Charles University.

That may have also helped to stymie the relationship of Czechs with Terezin. Hajkova says she has faced no blowback from her work on the camp, though the author suggests there are more specific reasons her work has not incurred the kind of anger that it might meet elsewhere.

There is no real debate over the history of Terezin in Czechia, she says, although is careful to stress that this is her personal, rather than scholarly, opinion. Compared with most countries towards the eastern end of Europe, Hajkova continues, the Czechs understand the Holocaust as a story apart that does not play a large role in national memory.

That, she suggests, may be because the country did not suffer the same depth of trauma as its neighbours. However, the historian also notes the way in which virulent anti-communism has come to dominate the national narrative in the Czech public and political spheres.

Its a dynamic illustrated by recent political episodes. The former Senate president Jaroslav Kubera became a hero last year when his defiance of the Chinese Communist Party ended in a fatal heart attack. Yet that status was bestowed upon him by the nation not long after he told an audience at Terezin that totalitarianism and racism have taken the form of environmental protection, gender equality, political correctness and multiculturalism.

More recently, protestors appeared on the streets of Prague wearing yellow stars, claiming that those refusing COVID-19 vaccination will be marked out in the same way that Jews were during the war. Still, there was little public outcry, save for the objections of stunned Jewish groups.

Thus, Hajkovas book challenges not so much established national narratives of the ghetto and Holocaust, but a virtual wall of silence.

I think its liberating and helps people to think about the societies they live in to tell these silenced stories, the author argues. Czechia has not had this reckoning with its past when it comes to communism, nor the Holocaust.

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The silences of Terezin - Balkan Insight