Terezín commemorates victims of last Gestapo execution

Around one hundred people gathered at the National cemetery in Terezín, north of Prague, to commemorate the victims of the last execution carried out in the Gestapo-run in Terezín’s Little Fortress in 1945. The 51 members of various resistance groups were executed 63 years ago in the Gestapo prison in what was the largest execution in the history of Terezín. More than 150,000 people passed through the Terezín ghetto between 1941 and 1945 and some 35,000 people died there. The rest were sent on to Nazi camps in the east, where most of them perished. After the war, Terezín’s Little Fortress was turned into a wartime memorial.

Over 800 bronze name plates bearing the names of wartime victims were recently stolen from the gravestones at the national cemetery in Terezín and were later found to have been sold as scrap metal. The damage that the Holocaust memorial suffered is thought to have run into millions of crowns, all of the bronze plates were found broken into pieces. The memorial hopes to replace the name plates by May 18, the day commemorating the victims of Nazi persecution.