Paris: The Mauthausen Concentration Camp Monument at Père Lachaise Cemetery

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Mauthausen Memorial. Gérard Choain, sculptor (1958). Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Mauthausen Memorial. Gérard Choain, sculptor (1958). Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Mauthausen Memorial. Gérard Choain, sculptor (1958). Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Paris: The Mauthausen Concentration Camp Monument at  Père Lachaise Cemetery
by Samuel D. Gruber

A a recent visit to Paris I spent much of the day at the enormous Père Lachaise Cemetery, which besides begin a 44-hectare cemetery is also one of Europe's great outdoor sculpture museums. The list of famous people buried there is very long, but I was most interested in seeing monuments erected in the past 70 years commemorating victims of various Nazi concentration and death camps.

These monuments, which now number more than a dozen, have been erected by camp survivors, political organizations, and other other associations beginning in 1949, when memorials to victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau (June) an the camp at Neuengamme (November) were dedicated. Since then additional monuments to victims of the camps at  Ravensbrück (1955), Mauthausen (1958), Buchenwald-Dora (1964), Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen (1970) Dachau (1985), Flossenbürg (1988), Buna-Monowitz Auschwitz III (1993), Bergen-Belsen (1994), Natzweiler-Struthof (2004) have been erected. In addtion there is a monument (2006) to the deportees of Convoy 73  which took Jews from Drancy to the Ninth Fort in Kaunas, Lithuania.

I was especially interested in the 1958 Mauthausen (also referred to as Mauthausen-Gusen) memorial, which I include in my class.  This memorial is of note for many reasons. It is if high artistic merit, but also its location, materials, explicit narrative, and inscriptions all have meaning in relation to the rest of the cemetery, the history of art, and specific acts of Nazi cruelty. As of August 2018, I found the monument, which was created by sculptor Gérard Choain (1906-19880, in restoration.  Choain himself was a wounded veteran and was a prisoner of war in German camps from 1939 to 1945. After the war he created several memorial sculptures.

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Mauthausen Memorial. Gérard Choain, sculptor (1958). Announcement of the design in the 1957 newsletter of the sponsoring survior's group, Amicale de Mauthausen,

Formally, the monument is designed for its context in the Père Lachaise cemetery. It is located near an a corner in section 97, and its tall granite architecture stands above many of the nearby tombs. At first, the form of the granite appears similar to an obelisk or tower, which are frequent motifs employed throughout the cemetery, against which a stone or bronze allegorical figure are often placed. A good example is the towering granite  tomb of Jacques Léon Clément-Thomas and Claude Lecomte (1875) created by architect Georges-Ernest Coquart and sculptor Louis-Leon Cugnot. This monument, like many others in the cemetery, presents a triumphant interpretation of death and entombment.

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Tomb of Jacques Léon Clément-Thomas and Claude Lecomte, 1875. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Unlike the Clemont-Thomas-Lecomte monument, which boasts a large allegorical figure of an armored woman with sword and wreath, the Mauthausen monument is not triumphantly allegorical, but instead its architecture and sculpture are two important parts constituting a unified fact-inspired narrative. The stone setting is no mere backdrop, but is intended as an active element in the memorial's story-telling. The steep-stepped granite tower represents the infamous Stairs of Death at the Mauthausen granite quarry where prisoners were forced to climb carrying granite blocks weighing 25 kilos and more, and where they often plummeted to their deaths. 

The very material has meaning - the granite for the monument was brought from the quarry and stands like a holy relic, a witness to suffering (compare with the Warsaw uprising Monument where the granite for the giant stele has originally be quarried for a Nazi monument that was never built). Empowering inert material has its roots in ancient religions, but also is common in Christian practice, where the very stones where Jesus is said to have trod, or the column to which he was bound, or the parts of cells or pieces of torture instruments of martyrs have been treasured. More broadly, any item that had contact with a saint either living or dead, can assume some aspect of that saint's holiness; thus the cult of relics. 

In the commemoration of the victims of Nazism and especially of the Holocaust, this power of authenticity will continue to hold sway in later memorials and museums when in the 1940s and 1950s earth and ashes were brought from crematoria to help sanctify new memorial sites. Later, in the 1980s until today, Holocaust museums strive to acquire original boxcars and other now-iconic Holocaust items. A recent twist on this is the casting in bronze of "real" objects as simulacra for commemorative purpose.

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Mauthausen Memorial, detail. Gérard Choain, sculptor (1958). Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Mauthausen Memorial, detail. Gérard Choain, sculptor (1958). Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

The bronze figure of an emaciated prisoner sculpted by Gérard Choain attempts carries a heavy  stone to the top of the 186 Stairs of Death. While this explicitly recalls the life and death daily struggle of prisoners who worked in the quarry, Choain's figure also has a distinguished artistic pedigree. Any Frenchman immediately sees the resemblance to Auguste Rodin's great statue of The Shade (also known as The Slave) of 1886. This was the figure used in triplicate atop Rodin's massive Gates of Hell, which in many other contexts has greatly influenced the imagery of Holocaust suffering and death (including most obviously the central sculpture of the Miami Holocaust Memorial).

There is also a close connection to Michelangelo's unfinished slaves (also known as The Prisoners) intended for the Tomb of Pope Julius II, and since 1909 on view at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence.

Auguste Rodin, The Shade (or the Slave), 1881-1886. Bronze. Musée Rodin, Paris. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2013.

Michelangelo. Slaves or Prisoners (unfinished works originally intended tomb of Julius II). Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence.

The inscriptions on the Mauthausen memorial are long and explicit. On the right side is written (here translated into English):

The right side reads:

Mauthausen

Nazi extermination camp

12500 French were deported there

10000 were exterminated there

Their plight was carrying heavy stones up the 186 steps of the

staircase while under the blows of the SS.

This monument perpetuates their memory and their struggle for French independence.

Remember!

And the left side reads:

Mauthausen

Nazi extermination camp

180,000 men and women were imprisoned

154,000 died tortured, gassed, shot, hanged

For their sacrifice helps to forever block the road to oppression

and to open humanity towards a better future in friendship and in

peace between peoples

Remember!

The detailed inscription is indicative that the moments was meant to be both a witness and a warning. The specificity is refreshing after the bland banalities inscribed on so many official monuments of later decades. Most of the inmates and victims at Mauthausen were not Jewish and this is not a Holocaust Monument per se. Still, the memorial plays an important role in the development of Holocaust monuments and iconography. It is one of a group of works in the late 1950s that focuses on the physical - even cadaverous - state of Holocaust victims, rather than idealizing them as healthy heroes and fighters. Compare, for example, this monument to the better known Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument by Natan Rappoport (1948) and the great Socialist Heroes monument at Buchenwald by Fritz Cremer, dedicated, like the Mauthausen Monument, in 1958.

Warsaw, Poland. Ghetto Uprising Monument. Natan Rapoport, sculptor, 1948. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2008.

Buchenwald, Germany., "Revolt of the Prisoners" (Revolte der Gefangenen), Fritz Cremer, sculptor, 1958. Photo: Richard Peter/Deutsche Fotothek.

According to the U.S, Holocaust Memorial Museum, inmates and victims at Mauthausen included more than 37,000 non-Jewish Poles,, nearly 23,000 Soviet civilians, between 6,200 and 8,650 Yugoslav civilians, approximately 6,300 Italians after September 1943at least 4,000 Czechs and in 1944, 47 Allied military personnel (39 Dutchmen, 7 British soldiers and 1 US soldier), all of them agents of the British Secret Operations Executive. In addition to French Resistance fighters thousands of Spanish Republicans were also brought to Mauthausen. About 29,000 Jews are believed to have been held at Mauthausen, mostly in the latter years of the war.

The Mauthausen site was one of the first to be memorialized after World War II, a subsequently became the site for dozens of monuments. Ashes and relics from Mauthausen were also incorporated in many other monuments in other locations, such as the extreme modernist Monumento in onore dei caduti nei campi di sterminio nazisti located outside Cimitero Monumentale di Milano. The glass and metal cube was designed by the architectural firm BBPR (Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti, Ernesto Nathan Rogers), one of whose founders, Gianluigi Banfi, was killed at Mauthausen. Earth from the site was encased at the heart of the monument to represent all of the camps in which Italians died (on this see: Jean-Marc Dreyfus, "The Transfer of ashes after the Holocaust in Europe, 1945-60," in Human Remains and Violence, I:2 (2015), p 23).

In France, the amalgamation of Resistance fighters, Jewish deportees, and other victims of Nazi crimes was in keeping with the themes of the Gaullist politics of memory of the 1950s, and also the general stance of the official Jewish Community, which beginning in the 1940s placed plaques in synagogues remembering Jewish victims under the heading "Morts pour la France," (Fallen for France), even though many victims died through the complicity of French authorities and police.

This generalization of national victim-hood would not begin to change until the 1970s, when films like The Sorrow and the Pity drew public attention to the widespread collaboration of the French Vichy government with the Nazi regime, and also the gradual recognition of the complicity of the French police in the round-up of Jews for deportation, especially in the event that has come to be known as the Vel d'HIV Roundup of July 16-17, 1942. Only in the 1990s were the special circumstances of the deportation and murder of Jews of France (native and resident refugees) fully acknowledged by President Chirac, and a new monument was dedicated in 1994 (about which I've written in the past). Also, beginning in 2002 many new notices about the deportation of Jewish children have also been posted around the city.

I'll post some more thoughts about some of the other memorials at Père Lachaise Cemetery in future posts, but here a few views of other monuments that build on the image of suffering presented on the Mauthausen Monument. In these subsequent memorials the figures are increasing contorted, emaciated, and cadaverous. There is a move away from the classical and heroic artistic language to one that is more fragmented, expressionist and abstract, influenced as much by the work of Picasso (Guernica), Lipchitz and Giacometti more than the tradition of Michelangelo, Delacroix, and Rodin.

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Buchenwald-Dora Memorial. Louis Bancel, sculptor (1964). Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Buchenwald-Dora Memorial, detail. Louis Bancel, sculptor (1964). Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen Memorial. Jean-Baptiste Leducq, sculptor (1970). Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen Memorial. Jean-Baptiste Leducq, sculptor (1970). Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Natzweiler-Struthof  Memorial (2004). The bronze figure is a replica of the figure by Georges Halbout installed at the entrance of the Strurthof camp. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Natzweiler-Struthof  Memorial (2004). The bronze figure is a replica of the figure by Georges Halbout installed at the entrance of the Strurthof camp. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Natzweiler-Struthof  Memorial (2004). The bronze figure is a replica of the figure by Georges Halbout installed at the entrance of the Strurthof camp. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

The Kaiser Franz Josef Jubiläumssynagoge (Emperor Franz Joseph Jubilee Synagogue) of St. Pölten, Austria: Where Were the Women?

St. Pölten, Austria. Synagogue. Theodor Schreier and Viktor Postelberg, architects, 1913. Restored 1984. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

St. Pölten, Austria. Synagogue. Theodor Schreier and Viktor Postelberg, architects, 1913. Restored 1984. View form women's gallery. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

St. Pölten, Austria. Synagogue. Ark with inscription noting women's donation. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

The Kaiser Franz Josef Jubiläumssynagoge (Emperor Franz Joseph Jubilee Synagogue) of St. Pölten, Austria: Where Were the Women?

by Samuel D Gruber
 

I recently wrote about one of the most recent Central European synagogue restorations at the Old Synagogue of Plzen and asked the question about the synagogue, "where were the women?" Now, I take a look a look at one of the first Central European synagogue restorations, that of the Kaiser Franz Josef Jubiläumssynagoge (Emperor Franz Joseph Jubilee)  of St. Pölten, Austria, dedicated in 1913, ruined on Kristallnacht in 1938, and restored in the 1980s, and ask the question again.

St. Pölten, Austria. Synagogue.  Entrance from main vestibule to women's staircase.Stairs to women's gallery. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

St. Pölten, Austria. Synagogue. Stairs to women's gallery. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

St. Pölten, Austria. Synagogue. Stairs to women's gallery. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Since 1988 the former synagogue has housed the Institute for Jewish History in Austria, founded by historian Klaus Lohrmann. I want to thank the Institute's long-time director Martha Keil for her enthusiastic welcome (on short notice) and her tour and history of the building. Though I have known of the St. Pölten restoration since I first entered the field of Jewish heritage preservation in 1988, this was my first visit. While Martha was apologetic about the deficiencies of the restoration of more than thirty years ago, in fact, the work at St. Pölten was ahead of its time and the restoration has held up reasonably well. Much of that is due to Martha's own long commitment to the building, which, when it was saved from extremely derelict condition had no real plan for future use. The creation, development, and sustenance of the Institute has protected the building, and also done much to recovery and present important aspects of the Jewish history and culture of St. Pölten and of Austria. The Institute maintains a full schedule of events, workshops, courses, and exhibits.

St. Pölten, Austria. Synagogue.Elevation. Source: Center for Jewish Art.

The long planning history and the relatively quick construction history of the St. Pölten synagogue are well-documented and are reported in an essay by Christoph Lind .Restoring History? St. Pölten’s Jewish Past and online here. The process was familiar. Need for a new and bigger building, requests denied and then reconsidered, negotiations with city officials, solicitations of designs from noted architects, and then the drawn-out fund-raising campaign. In the end Viennese architects Theodor Schreier and Viktor Postelberg were selected for the job (it should be noted that Schreier was deported at age 70 to Terezin in 1943, where he died). 

St. Pölten, Austria. Synagogue. Portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph commissioned for the synagogue by Samuel and Bertha Mandl. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Unusual, perhaps, is correspondence about plans to place a bust of the Emperor Franz Joseph – after whom the synagogue was to be named – in the building’s vestibule. Happily, the idea was scratched, but a portrait painting of the Emperor was commissioned by congregants Samuel and Bertha Mandl instead. The portrait was rediscovered and identified by Martha Keil in 2000 and is back at the synagogue. it is possibly the very last evidence of the widespread Jewish devotion to the Austro-Hungarian imperial ideal before it all collapsed in World War I and that relatively tolerant age ended forever.

The accounts of the August 1913 dedication are detailed, too. There were many long speeches by Jewish community officials and government leaders. Not surprisingly, everyone who spoke was a man and I suppose they all wore elegant coats and top hats. But we know there were women there crowding the galleries, and they had played a role in the building of the new synagogue, too, and it must have been a pretty prominent role. Though they did not address the assembled dignitaries and congregants on dedication day, acknowledgment of their gift took pride of place in an inscription on the Ark.

St. Pölten, Austria. Synagogue. Ark. Detail with inscription noting women's donation. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

A women’s charitable association was founded in St. Pölten in 1902 and on the Ark is written in German but in Hebrew letters (with an umlaut over the aleph) the inscription  “Gespendet vom Frauenverein St. Pölten" ("donated by the St. Pölten’s Women’s Association").

St. Pölten, Austria. Synagogue. View from Ark to women's galleries and choir loft. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

St. Pölten, Austria. Synagogue. Theodor Schreier and Viktor Postelberg, architects, 1913. Restored 1984.  Stairs to women's gallery. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

At St. Pölten, as in Plzen and almost all the other synagogues in the Empire, women were in the gallery. The inscription, set high on the Ark is one element of the sanctuary of which they would have had a good view. The galleries in St. Pölten were spacious and probably comfortable, but the original seating does not survive. The proportions of the building were much different than the Old Synagogue in Plzen. The main sanctuary was wider, and the distance from the women’s galleries to the main floor was less. Women could sit closer and see more, and probably the sound carried better. An additional gallery space for choir is also set above the women's gallery at the entrance end of the sanctuary, opposite the Ark wall.

The women entered the same door from the outside as the men, but then took one of two stairways upstairs. These were elegant sweeping stairways, much more accommodating – and better to look at – than the tortured twisting stairs at Plzen. With their elegant iron railing, these stairs recalled a concert hall more than traditional Jewish separation – but still, the women were separated and had their special place. From there, however, they could look at the Ark.  Their Ark. The one they’d donated.

St. Pölten, Austria. Synagogue. Memorial tablet in front of building.. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018

Of course, after the Anscluss of March 2, 1938, and then the Kristallnacht Pogrom on November 10, 1938 when the synagogue was looted, the interior gutted and its contents burned, few Jews remained in St. Polten. Many fled or went into hiding, others were deported. By 1945, however, at least 575 men, women, and children of the Jewish community St. Pölten known by name were murdered by Nazis and their collaborators. A large tablet with the names of many of these victims is erected in front of the synagogue. It was first set up in 1998, the two outer panels were added in 2008, and then the small one (in metal), was installed in 2016. The memorial grows as more names are learned. Reading the tablet, where the women were in the synagogue doesn't seem to matter much. Women and men were joined in death, or in the best circumstances, into exile.

We mourn the victims and remember their suffering and loss. We remain indignant that it took the Austrian government until the 1990s and even more recently to admit and discuss Austrian complicity in Nazi oppression and atrocity. We are grateful that the Institute for Jewish History in Austria is telling the stories of Jewish victims, and the history of their communities.

The "Secret" Synagogues of the Terezin Ghetto

Terezin, CZ. "Secret Synagogue". "May your eyes behold Your return to Zion in compassion" (Amidah). Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Terezin, CZ. "Secret Synagogue". Painted candles flanking the location of the Ark. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018

Terezin, CZ. "Secret Synagogue". Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018

Terezin, CZ. "Secret Synagogue." "But despite all this, we have not forgotten Your name. We beg You not to forget us. (Taharun) / "O God who is slow to anger and full of mercy, treat us accordingly to Your abundant mercy and save us for Your name's sake. Hear, our king, our prayer, and from our foes rescue us. Hear, our King, our prayer, and from every distress and woe rescue us." (Tahanun).  Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

The "Secret" Synagogues of the Terezin Ghetto
by Samuel D. Gruber

A few weeks ago I visited Terezin, the 18th-century military city in northern Bohemia (now Czech Republic) that was remade beginning in 1941 into  Germany's "model ghetto" they called Theresienstadt - a vast overcrowded holding pen for discouraged, uncertain, underfed, and exploited Jewish prisoners from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, and other countries which "housed" as many as 58,000 men, women and children held there at one time - always with the overflow population being sent off to death at Auschwitz, and then most of the inmates sent there, too. While Terezin was re-concerted into a town after World War II, today parts are now maintained as the Terezin Memorial.

Terezin was the ante-chamber to Auschwitz for more than a hundred thousand Jews. There are many aspects to the historical town and to the Nazi-created ghetto about which I could write - architectural, urban, interpretive, preservationist, museological, anthropological, etc. Here I only discuss the so-called "secret synagogues," those places where Jews gathered with tacit German permission to pray and follow age-old religious rituals under new and horrific circumstances. Most of the prayer places were used on as an "as needed" basis by adapting other spaces. This is documented in many surviving drawings and in some survivor accounts.

Helga Weissova Hoskova (b. 1929) Hanukah in the attic of block L410, 1943. Helga was 14 years old when she made this drawing. Source: Artists of Terezin.

Only of prayer room with some of it original decoration survives. This space was created by Artur Berlinger, a German WWI veteran, religious teacher, and artist  who was imprisoned at Terezin with his wife Berta from the fall of 1942 until their deportation to Auschwitz in the fall of 1944. During that time Berlinger created the prayer room in an old storage space and conducted regular religious services there.

Artur Berlinger in pre-Holocaust cantor's garb.

This fall I'll be teaching a class at Syracuse University on "The Holocaust, Memory and the Visual Arts," so this prayer room has immediate relevancy for me.There are very few places where art made by Holocaust victims remains intact and in situ, and where the intent can be so clearly understood. We have many surviving artworks - mostly small sketches - made by various artist prisoners of some of the impromptu prayer spaces in the Ghetto, but this is the only such space that survives at all intact. At least one other decorated prayer space is known from a drawing made by Paul Schwarz, who depicts painted lions holding the Tablets of the Law on the Ark wall (Schwarz was subsequently killed at Auschwitz, but his wife survived and saved many of his drawings).

Terezin, Czech Republic. Prayer room in former garage. Drawing by Paul Schwartz. Source: L. Chladkova, The Terezin Ghetto.

I've also been researching synagogue wall painting, so this example of synagogue walls painted in the most difficult of circumstances is of special importance to understanding the overall value of painted inscriptions, symbols and other motifs. These were not mere decoration, but were integral to the authenticity and holiness of the place.

Lastly, I was proud to visit because the second restoration of the Berlanger synagogue after the devastating floods of 2002 was carried out with financial assistance of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, of which I was Research Director at the time.  I had nothing directly to do with the project, but it was a very good one for the Commission to support (raising private funds). Commission member Amy Epstein led the Commission funding effort and Seth Gerszberg made the major donation to the project. Besides the inevitable emotion on entering this little space, after many years I was very excited to see the result of their work.

Terezin, CZ. "Secret Synagogue". Small plaque over entrance to synagogue acknowledging donors to restoration.  Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Terezin, Czech Republic, Small plaque giving information about Artur Berlinger, who created and presided over this worship space. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2018.

Berlinger was 53 when he came to Terezin. He had been sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht in November 1938, but after his return continued to lead the remnants of the Jewish community in Schweinfurt, Germany until he was sent on one of the last transports to Terezin. After Kristallnacht he and his wife arranged for their daughters to leave for England on a “kindertransport” and the children survived the war. Artur and Berta were transported to and killed at Auschwitz in September and October 1944.

A calendar for the Jewish Year 5704 (1943-44) that was illustrated by Asher Berlinger in Terezin. Photo: Yad Vashem,

Besides creating the synagogue, Berlanger illustrated  a calendar for the Jewish Year 5704 (1943-44) with printed zodiac symbols on the front cover that was created by Avraham Hellmann and is now in the collection of Yad Vashem. Hellmann had a background similar to Berlanger. He was Head Cantor in the Nikolsburg (today Mikulov, Czech Republic) community as well as being the founder of the Jewish Museum of Bohemia & Moravia. He apparently helped sustain religious life at Terezin before his deportation to and death at Auschwitz, and was especially important in caring for the dead and keeping track of their names and their remains.The relationship of the two men is unknown, but Berlanger's calendar, which has clear illustrations of his little synagogue, came into the possession of Hellman's (who signed it) and was donated to Yad Vashem.The calendar pictures indicate that there was an actual ark,  reader's table and Torah scroll in Berlanger's synagogue.

A calendar for the Jewish Year 5704 (1943-44) that was illustrated by Asher Berlinger in Terezin. Photo: Yad Vashem,

Terezin, CZ. "Secret Synagogue." "Know before whom you "stand" is probably the most common passage found in synagogues, and it was used here on the side wall which is where the "ark" - or whatever was used in its place - would have stood. The niche in the wall is flanked by paintings of candles. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Terezin, CZ. "Secret Synagogue." "But despite all this, we have not forgotten Your name. We beg You not to forget us. (Taharun) / "O God who is slow to anger and full of mercy, treat us accordingly to Your abundant mercy and save us for Your name's sake. Hear, our king, our prayer, and from our foes rescue us. Hear, our King, our prayer, and from every distress and woe rescue us." (Tahanun).  Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Terezin, CZ. "Secret Synagogue". "If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill," (Psalms 137:5).
Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018

During his time at Terezin, Berlinger created the permanent and semi-secret synagogue, probably the most formal of the many prayer spaces used by inmates. Given his skills as an artist it is assumed that he worked in one of the artisan workshops where he was able to get materials to paint the walls which he decorated with carefully chosen plaintive and affirmative inscriptions, and where he conducted religious services. Besides the care given to the placement and calligraphy of the inscriptions, it is the intentionality of scriptural and prayer passages (Amidah, Tahunun) that is especially poignant. 

Unfortunately for the visitor, the multi-lingual translation of these texts are only available in an accompanying book, and not in the prayer hall or immediately adjacent, so that most visitors lose this important aspect of the experience.

This space was rediscovered in 1989 and restored in the 1990s, but then seriously damaged in the floods of 2002, before being restored again. Parts of the inscriptions were irrevocably destroyed and are now documented only in photos. 

Terezin, CZ. "Secret Synagogue".Courtyard from where the synagogue is entered (door on right)
Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Terezin, CZ. "Secret Synagogue". Entryway from courtyard to synagogue.
Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

There were other prayer spaces at Terezin that we know only from surviving drawings by some of the ghetto's many artists. Unlike Berlinger's prayer house, most of these spaces would have been contemporary - adapted as needed for services or holiday ceremonies.Jews at prayer were depicted by many of the camp artists. The following illustrations come from a number of sources.

Bedrich Fritta. Jews at prayer.

Leo Haas. Religious Services, Terezin. Source: Art of the Holocaust, fig 750.

Leo Haas. Religious Services. Artists of Terezin.

Moritz Nagel, Prayer, Terezin, 1943.

Jan Burka (b. 1924, Prague). Prayers in the attic, Terezin. Pencil. Source: Yad Vashem.

Ferdinand Bloch. Terezin Services in the Attic. Source:  Jewish Customs and Traditions Jewish Museum of Prague), 34.

Karel Fleischmann. Torah Reading on the Sabbath. Source: Artists of Terezin.

The guidebook Prayer Room from the Time of the Terezin Ghetto by Ludmila Chladkova published by the Terezin memorial and available for sale at the synagogue site was extremely helpful in preparing this post.