Paradise Camp

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Paradise Camp

Gate at Theresienstadt
Directed by Frank Heimans
Produced by Lee Burns
Written by Paul Rea
Release date(s) 1986
Running time 56 min.
Language English
Official website

Paradise Camp is a 1986 documentary about Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Unlike other Holocaust camps, Jews entered Theresianstadt willingly, even eagerly, because Nazi lies led them to believe it would be a peaceful retreat. The deception continued even after it was clear that Theresienstadt was a ghetto. The Nazis used the camp to film a pro-concentration camp propaganda film and fool Red Cross officials into believing the Jews were being well cared for.

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[edit] Summary

“They had nice coats. They brought pictures,” a witness remembers of prominent Czech Jews entering Theresienstadt at its opening. “They wanted to make their beautiful spa stay very nice, and, when they arrived in big barracks, they couldn’t understand what happened.”

location of Theresienstadt within Czechoslovakia
location of Theresienstadt within Czechoslovakia

Paradise Camp reveals how Nazi deception fooled Jews into entering Theresienstadt willingly. Elderly Jews were fooled into believing the camp would be their safe haven, World War I veterans thought that their service to Germany was being rewarded, and prominent Jews thought they were being given special treatment for their German nationalism, with fine accommodations and protection from the war. But they all found themselves sleeping in overcrowded barracks, eating meager portions of bread, and fearing for their lives. Paradise Camp features interviews with survivors, who experienced the hunger, filth and terror that the Nazi officials worked to mask, and displays old photographs and archival film footage, to reconstruct the truth about Theresienstadt.

Originally a fortress town in Terezin, Czechoslovakia, Theresienstadt was built in the 1800s for the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa. But the Nazis realized the high stone walls that surrounded the city made it an ideal site in which to imprison Jews from Czechoslovakia and its neighboring Eastern European nations. In 1941, the Germans established it as a Jewish ghetto, and a year later they began to deport Jews from Theresienstadt to extermination camps throughout Eastern Europe, including Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka.

The Nazis turned Theresienstadt into the equivalent of a film set, the Nazis applied a fresh coat of paint to the buildings, cleaned the streets, and brought in ample props for the making of a propaganda film that depicted life at a concentration camp as comfortable and enjoyable. The little old women knit, a small boy waters a garden with an oversized water barrel, and everyone wears a lazy smile and a healthy layer of fat.

Inside Theresienstadt today
Inside Theresienstadt today

In sharp contradiction to these false images, the documentary also offers the survivors’ memories of what life was really like at Theresienstadt. One woman remembers eating crushed red brick and pretending it was paprika, while crushed bark served as an alternative spice. Another woman recalls that before a Red Cross inspection, the Nazis built children’s rooms painted in bright colors and lined with small beds. But the Nazis never told the Red Cross inspectors that the tiny beds were inhabited by seventeen-year-olds, because all the younger children had been murdered.

But, artistically, the survivors also show what life in Theresienstadt was truly like. Some Jews were able to smuggle in paper and pencils and, using these simple resources to their highest advantage, they drew everything they saw. The documentary shows their shocking work. Sketches of victims with sunken eyes, ragged clothes and bony fingers document starvation and need.

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[edit] See also

Other documentaries about the Holocaust:

Other articles relevant to Paradise Camp:

"Paradise Camp" in fiction: Herman Wouk's "War and Remembrance"

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