The setting: The Austro-Hungarian fortress town of Theresienstadt (Terezin) in Bohemia, near the German border, became the site of one of the most unusual German camps for Jews. Like the ghettos in Poland, it was carved out of a city by putting up a fence; but its inmates were brought from afar rather than being local, and its housing consisted principally of disused army barracks. Though normally managed in the classic manner of Nazi camps, with a combination of neglect and brutality – extreme overcrowding, minimal food rations and scanty hygiene led (the movie tells us) to 300 "natural" deaths a day in a population of over 60,000 – it was considered a "privileged" camp to which Jews whom the Nazis wished to treat relatively well (because of influential connections) were sent from all over Europe, along with a mass of ordinary Jews from Austria, Germany and the Czech lands. Most of the Jews of Prague passed through Theresienstadt. It was enough like a normal city in basic appearance that the Nazis conceived the idea of polishing it up for display to the International Red Cross, and even making a film there to show how well Nazi Germany was treating the Jews. Its principal function, however, was as a transit camp on the way to death camps, mainly Auschwitz-Birkenau. Towards the end it was mostly evacuated, but not entirely. About one in seven of its inmates survived, one of them being Arnošt Lustig. Many of his stories are set there, including one you will read later in the course, "The Old Ones and Death".

A great deal of this is conveyed in the opening minutes of the film, as General Knecht arrives on a brief inspection visit which must be approximately in June 1944. A transport to Auschwitz is being assembled, with over 800 people lined up. In the camp a film with the title Hitler Presents a Town to the Jews is being shot (on Goebbels’ orders, as we know from other sources); the inmate director is filming inmate actors in specially issued clothes against specially cleaned-up backgrounds. Off camera the crowds mill around – the exhausted elderly, the anxious middle-aged, and the quietly rebellious young folk – in streets patrolled by Jewish policemen. A forthcoming visit of the International Red Cross is under discussion in the camp administration. The leadership of the Jewish community changes hands as Löwenbach refuses to collaborate with the Germans any longer and Marmulstaub takes his place. And preparations for another, larger transport begin.

Director Brynych (b. 1927) shot the film on location in Terezin. The filmmakers sought authenticity not only through the memories of Lustig and others but also by means of extensive research in the camp records, and they went to great lengths to recover the look of the times: General Knecht’s limousine in the film, for instance, is the very same Mercedes that Adolf Eichmann used on an inspection visit to the camp. None of the characters bears the name of a real person, so far as I can tell, but some are modeled on actual people: Ignaz Marmulstaub, for instance, on the real Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein of Vienna, who was widely hated in the camp. General Knecht may well be intended to represent (loosely) Adolf Eichmann himself, head of the Jewish section of the SS’s central security office and organizer of the extermination program.