Ugly Beautifications 1
Propaganda amidst atrocities
“Always
If I fall into night, the moon picks
me up,
falling into the day, I am steadied
by the sun.
The angels, they see me as
Satan,
but Satan says I’m an angelic one. ”— Ekhmetjan Osman, translated from Uyghur by Joshua L. Freeman.
Terezín is a small scenic town in the northwestern lowlands of the Czech Republic. The town is about midway between Prague, its capital, and Dresden, Germany. The Eger River flows north past the town, merging into the westerly winding Elbe, one of the major rivers of central Europe.
The town was well kept: the streets were immaculately clean, decorated with green trees and blooming roses. Several coffee houses and shops stood in a row along the beautifully named streets, like a formation of soldiers. A school, a library, and a theater provide ample avenues for education and cultural activity. The art scene was vibrant: concerts, operas, comedy shows, and painting exhibitions were frequent. At one point, classical musicians and composers like Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krása, Gideon Klein, and Rafael Schächter stayed in a settlement in Terezin. Other notable inhabited include philosopher Emil Utiz, writer H. G. Adler, comedian Karel Švenk, painter Leo Haas, cartoonist Bedřich Fritta, illustrator Jo Spier, and actor and director Kurt Gerron.
On a fine June day, Maurice Rossel, a Swiss doctor and an official of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), visited the town as part of an international delegation. The eight-hour tour was well-organized. Throughout the tour, the delegates were never left alone, always guided by Major Paul Eppstein and accompanied by several enthusiastic civilians. Mr Rossel was impressed by the tidiness and beauty of the town and relieved to see the fashionably dressed, clean-shaven, and healthy-looking inhabitants. The highlight of the tour was the opera Brundibár, performed mostly by well-nourished and seemingly happy children, to the excitement and exuberant applause of the audience in the end.
The town was advertised as a spa and retirement settlement, and its inhabitants were almost exclusively Jews. It was run by a Jewish council and had its special banknotes. The inhabitants were free to practice religion as evidenced by the existence of Torah scrolls, a prayer room, and several rabbis like Leo Baeck and Benjamin Murmelstein.
The summer of 1944 was the best time for many inhabitants of this Jewish settlement, but appallingly, also the final one for most of them. The settlement, beautified prior to the delegate’s visit, was in fact an internment camp called Theresienstadt ghetto. It served as a way stop to extermination camps like Auschwitz, which lies 500 kilometers to the east. The Theresienstadt ghetto also played a role in Nazi propaganda to conceal atrocities against the Jewish people and deceive visitors like the ICRC official Maurice Rossel.
The reality is that the Theresienstadt ghetto was built using stolen property from Jews and by the interned Jews, and purposefully built to inflict maximum pain and casualty. It was dirty and overcrowded, and food was scarce. At one point, it housed 60,000 people at the same time. Thousands of people died just from malnutrition and diseases.
But during the beautification campaign, which started four months before the delegates’ visit, the ghetto was cleaned. Trees and rose buds were planted, and fake shops and coffee house fronts were set up by the interned Jews under the Nazi orders. Thousands of elderly, sick, and disabled were transported to Auschwitz. Meanwhile, the remaining young and healthy prisoners were well-fed and treated better. Jewish intellectuals, musicians, and artists were brought from other internment camps. Cultural and social activities were also temporarily encouraged.
The infamous tour took place on June 23rd, 1944. On the date of the visit, the delegates were only allowed to visit certain parts of the ghetto, and always under the supervision of a Nazis dressed as a civilian chauffeur and a Jewish council elder, who was beaten up just a few days earlier by the Nazis after he was forced to sign a letter declaring that he was the major and the ghetto was a normal small town for the Jews. The delegates were only allowed to speak toccertain predetermined individuals.
Maurice Rossel wrote a favorable report, even stating the Jews in the Theresienstadt ghetto lived better lives than others outside. However, as predicted by some ICRC officials and others before the visit, the Nazis used the tour as proof that the Theresienstadt ghetto was not an internment camp and the Jewish were treated well. The Nazis even produced a propaganda film.
The “rosy” days ended as fast as it started. Only a few months later, thousands of interned, including most of the musicians, artists, and intellectuals mentioned earlier, were transported to Auschwitz. There, they, along with hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over Europe, were gassed using a toxic chemical manufactured by enslaved workers of IG Farben, a chemical company that BASF was a part of.
********************
I learned about the Theresienstadt ghetto for the first time from Paul Beatty’s book The Sellout. I was intrigued and surprised by the Nazi propaganda effort. Initially, I believed the Nazis operated brazenly, without any regard to what others think. As I learned more about it, from Wikipedia and several Holocaust memorial websites, I realized the Nazi beautification campaign was convincing to some, especially to indifferent bystanders. Ellie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace prize laureate, emphasized the danger of a “neutral bystander” attitude in his 1986 acceptance speech: “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim; Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
One would like to believe and hope that atrocities like the Holocaust were in the past. But the reality of what’s going on will make you immediately realize the naivety of that optimism. Antisemitism is on the rise, even before Israel’s revengeful invasion of Gaza after the Hamas massacre of October 7th, 2023, and accelerated thereafter. It seems racists of all shades have been trying to hijack the rightful public outrage against Israelis’ atrocity in Gaza and turn it into all-out Jewish hatred. Clear anti-Semitic statements and messages start to surface from the corners of the internet, especially on social media like Twitter. It is not hard to find posts, some by prominent and seemingly educated, praising Hamas for its massacre, ridiculing Jewish men in orthodox clothes as dirty and weird, and spreading rumors that Jews are greedy and control the world.
One lesson I’ve learned from the history of the Holocaust is that demeaning and hateful language often preludes atrocities and ethnic cleansing. Therefore, when I notice racist rhetoric oozing from the wounded souls of the internet like festering pus, I feel compelled to speak up. By doing so, I hope to prevent hatred from swelling, exploding, and infecting us all, potentially becoming the prevailing social norm.
So amidst the troubling rise of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and the dehumanization of Palestinians, I choose to speak up in protest. I hope that Jewish people reading this feel that I, a Uyghur Muslim, am aware of the historical atrocities your community has endured and continues to face daily. I hear your pain and fear. I also hope that haters reading this understand my position, and think twice before uttering or posting something racist, at least in my presence.
Notes:
My journey of writing this piece was by accident. I’ve been trying to write a piece about the Chinese government propaganda of my hometown, East Turkistan (aka Xinjiang). I came across the Theresienstadt ghetto when reading the fiction The Sellout by Paul Beatty during the one-week Eid al-Adha holiday. I was intrigued by the eerily similarity of the Chinese propaganda and the Nazi beautification campaign. Unable to write one coherent piece about the two, I decided to write them separately. This is the first piece of the series.
Some sources I’ve learned about the Theresienstadt ghetto:
- https://www.holocaust.cz/en/history/events/the-makeover-of-the-theresienstadt-ghetto/
- https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/23-june-1944-the-red-cross-visits-terezin-concentration-camp/
- https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/2024/01/25/cultural-production-in-the-confines-of-theresienstadt-works-in-the-foyle-special-collections-library-and-the-wiener-holocaust-library/
- https://www.timesofisrael.com/74-years-since-liberation-a-visit-to-theresienstadt-finds-an-eerie-ghost-town/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7jBQ6WlifU
Other References:
- For the readers interested in Paul Beatty’s book, Theresienstadt is mentioned at the end of the book, on page 261, lines 9–133. In the book, Foy, a frustrated unsuccessful black intellectual complains to the main character of the book, nicknamed Sellout by Foy, for lack of progress in racial equality in the US and exposes some exalted progress as fake and compares to other world events: “Like the Germans, who, in turn, in the next war, built fake stores, theaters, and parks in Theresienstadt to dupe the Red Cross into believing that no atrocities were taking place when the entire war was a series of fucking atrocities-one bullet, one illegal detention, one sterilization, one atom bomb at a time.”
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/13/anti-semitism-and-safety-fears-surge-among-us-jews-survey-finds
- https://ravenmagazine.org/magazine/the-great-masquerade-of-evil/
