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The Last Ghetto is a social and cultural history of Terezín, or Theresienstadt, a transit ghetto for Central and Western European Jews prior to their deportation for murder in the East. It offers the first analytical case study of a Holocaust victim society that explains human behavior
in extremis, and demonstrates how prisoners created new social hierarchies, reshaped their conceptions of family, and developed new loyalties. Based on extensive research in archives around the world and empathetic reading of victim testimonies, this history of everyday life in a prisoner society reveals the many forms of agency and adaptation in Nazi concentration camps and ghettos.
List of contents
- Introduction: The Well-Known, Poorly Understood Ghetto
- 1. "The Overorganized Ghetto" Administering Terezín
- 2. A Society Based on Inequality
- 3. The Age of Pearl Barley: Food and Hunger
- 4. Medicine and Illness
- 5. Cultural Life: Leisure Time Activities
- 6. Transports to the East
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
About the author
Anna Hájková is associate professor at the University of Warwick and the co-director of Warwick Center for Global Jewish Studies. Her first book, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt, came out in 2020 with Oxford University Press to academic and popular acclaim. Her new work on queer history of the Holocaust was published in Czech, German, British, US American, and Israeli newspapers. Hájková has also guest edited a special issue of German History, Holocaust, Sexuality, Stigma.
Summary
Terezín, as it was known in Czech, or Theresienstadt as it was known in German, was operated by the Nazis between November 1941 and May 1945 as a transit ghetto for Central and Western European Jews before their deportation for murder in the East. Terezín was the last ghetto to be liberated, one day after the end of World War II.
The Last Ghetto is the first in-depth analytical history of a prison society during the Holocaust. Rather than depict the prison society which existed within the ghetto as an exceptional one, unique in kind and not understandable by normal analytical methods, Anna Hájková argues that such prison societies that developed during the Holocaust are best understood as simply other instances of the societies human beings create under normal circumstances. Challenging conventional claims of Holocaust exceptionalism, Hájková insists instead that we ought to view the Holocaust with the same analytical tools as other historical events.
The prison society of Terezín produced its own social hierarchies under which seemingly small differences among prisoners (of age, ethnicity, or previous occupation) could determine whether one ultimately lived or died. During the three and a half years of the camp's existence, prisoners created their own culture and habits, bonded, fell in love, and forged new families. Based on extensive archival research in nine languages and on empathetic reading of victim testimonies, The Last Ghetto is a transnational, cultural, social, gender, and organizational history of Terezín, revealing how human society works in extremis and highlighting the key issues of responsibility, agency and its boundaries, and belonging.
Additional text
Making sense of life in Theresienstadt, as this brilliant, moving, and exceptionally well-researched monograph makes clear, meant finding strategies for survival, strategies that brought solidarity within groups but also tensions and hierarchies between them. Much of this was imagined retrospectively as resistance, but were such strategies resistance? Hájková has posed new questions, opening up a whole new field of research.
