Terizen

by JOEANN HART

On our walk back to the bus from Litoměřice, a medieval town preserved in time, I was slow to see the bodies on the ground. Distracted by the harsh shriek of birds, my neck was bent back to scan the branches where I saw an avian population in turmoil. The rooks, Old World crows, wanted us to look at them, not at the many fledglings we soon realized were scattered under the trees, where even the living were motionless, stunned into silence.

Our Czech guide feigned ignorance, but her gaze refused to follow my hand when I gestured to a small dead bird at our feet, so I know she knew. Perhaps she thought I was blaming her or her country, but all I wanted to find out was whether it was normal for rooks to be winnowed out so brutally upon leaving the nest. Had they left willingly, or were they cast out, nolens volens? I spoke no Czech, so I had no language to discuss aberrations of nature, and she seemed to have learned just enough English to walk us through Litoměřice. This was, after all, a river cruise, not an ornithological field trip. We were American tourists, and her job was to expose us to the best the region had to offer, with activities carefully prepackaged by the head office. 

The other excursion offered that afternoon had been a bus trip to Terizen, which the Germans called Theresienstadt, a WWII Nazi transit station to hold Jews before shipping them to other camps. Terizen was not, technically, a death camp, but it was a place of human suffering and steep mortality nonetheless. Many of Prague’s notable musicians and artists were held there, where disease and malnutrition took twenty percent of the population, the bodies removed to the ovens, their lives reduced to ash. Late in the war, when the International Red Cross had finally gotten wind of Nazi atrocities and requested a camp inspection, Terizen was polished up as a “model Jewish settlement.” Deportations increased to reduce overcrowding and a fake town was built, complete with a bakery, bank, and kindergarten. The streets were lined with flower beds. It looked so convincing the Nazis made a movie of it. After the filming of piano recitals and mountain hikes, after the satisfied inspectors had left, all of the adult participants in the charade and most of the children were sent to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Of the 150,000 Jews who passed through Terizen during the war, less than 27,000 were known to survive. 

But I was on a thirty-fifth wedding anniversary cruise from Berlin to Prague by way of carefully restored Dresden on the Elbe River. Having been to Dachau with my children a few years before, I didn’t feel the need to experience another concentration camp, not even a fake model one. It was all so disturbing; one visit seemed more than enough to learn the lessons to be had. At Dachau’s educational display in the prisoner barracks, I felt I had fully grasped how easy it had been for Germany to slip from democracy to fascism, from nationalism to genocide. So when my husband and I were given the choice between a beer tasting in Litoměřice or a bus trip to nearby Terizen, we chose the tasting, and I don’t even like beer.

Then Litoměřice was sort of a bust. It was empty of people, as if someone had sounded an alarm. gathered them up in the early hours and taken them away. The guide explained that it was Saturday, so the citizens had gone to “their places” in the country—most likely tending their garden allotments outside the city walls. Those few square meters had been the only private property allowed during the communist regime and were still held dear. 

After the tour of the micro-brewery, which seemed open just for us, we were left to explore the town on our own. But it was all locked up. The Bohemian museum was closed. City hall, with its chalice-shaped chimney, closed. A paper bag blew across a vast cobbled square that was ringed with fourteenth and fifteenth century buildings, punctuated with spires from four churches. All closed. We inspected a plague column, a common memorial throughout Europe. These are not, as one might think, in memory of those who perished in the Black Death, but in gratitude to the Virgin Mary for putting an end to the plague after some three hundred years of intermittent outbreaks. A long time to wait before helping, it seemed to me. 

People left in twos and fours to return to the familiar comforts of the boat. We lingered at the town’s ancient fortifications, looking at the river valley below. It, too, was quiet. There were less than twenty of us by the time we started down the hill, the guide herding us from behind. Our group was chatty, discussing what we had seen, or not seen, judging the town. There were some, like me, who regretted not going to Terizen. We’d shrugged off an opportunity to bear witness to recent history in favor of a couple of beers.

At the bottom of the hill, there was a cut-off through a playground and a narrow strip of woods. I could see the river through the trees, and since the path seemed quicker than the road, I took it. The guide tried to stop me, using her broken English, but I pretended not to understand and kept going. The group, engrossed in conversation, blindly followed. In the end, the guide followed too.

Three girls were playing on a swing set, one of the few signs of human activity we’d seen. They were subdued, for children, but this might have just been in contrast to the birds, whose noise began to drown out even our own voices. It was a warm May afternoon, but as soon as I stepped into the shadows of the newly leafed canopy, I felt a chill. The trees were as naked as pillars before opening up to limbs that held a dozen or more twiggy nests, dark puffs against the distant white sky. Scores of sooty rooks sat high in the branches, screaming. At first I thought they just didn’t want us walking through their territory; then I saw the first pinkish-gray body on the earth, the head unnaturally tilted back, the beak pointing to the river. After that, I saw dead bodies everywhere. Behind me, my fellow travelers slowed down and became hushed.

We don’t have rooks (Corvus frugilegus) where I live, but we have their close cousins, crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos). They are all corvids, from a word loosely translated as loud bird noises. I knew that with crows, after a fledgling leaves a nest, it is sometimes grounded for a day or two, during which time the adults hover about, feeding it and fending off other animals until it finds its wings. Or not. Certainly, between the impact of the fall and the rapacity of predators, there was a percentage that never made it. But crow nests are not crowded together as in a rookery, so I had never seen a whole generation forced to fly or die together. I had once read that the plague swept through towns with either a rake or a broom. A rake spared half the population from death; a broom took almost all. This was broom clean. Not only did the dead far outnumber the living, it was even hard to tell the difference between the two. The dead seemed not as fully formed as the survivors, but that might have been because they were on their backs, with their sparsely feathered underbellies exposed. Most of the living were splayed facedown where they had landed, their bodies shuddering for breath.

For reasons I do not understand, the keening adults did not mob us or swoop in a menacing way as crows would most certainly do. They stayed put, their talons dug tight into the boughs, bobbing up and down as they cried out, as if davening us out of the woods. We kept on, almost tip-toeing to avoid stepping on bodies, living or dead, and I wondered if there had been a catastrophic event, an environmental poisoning perhaps, or a false twist in the climate causing them to fledge too soon. Maybe they had been threatened by hawks or a man-made danger, like a drone. But whether the birds were acting on instinct or fear, the results were troubling, and I was glad to be almost out of the woods.

Just as the path was about to come to an end, we came upon the piles of dark fluff, bodies that had been picked at, if not completely eviscerated. Soft intestines had been wrenched from tender sockets of bone, and the high protein organs, like the liver and the heart, removed, maybe even by the rooks themselves. Like all corvids, they feed on carrion. Because of this, they are closely identified with death and war, and in folk tales, they are often represented as messengers from the underworld. They cannibalize their dead so as not to attract scavengers to those still living, eating their losses along with memory.

Nature’s efficient plan or not, it seemed wrong. Is that the word? If high mortality and cannibalism are a regular event in the reproductive cycles of rooks, I know I shouldn’t judge their behavior. Nature is not cruel, as Richard Dawkins wrote, only piteously indifferent. But I wanted to believe that this mass leap to death was not in their nature, not a way for the species to filter out the weak-winged and improve the gene pool. They are a big-brained bird, with an encephalization quotient of a chimp, meaning that their brain is two and a half times larger than their body size would predict. Surely they could see the madness of this carnage.

Then again, the encephalization quotient for humans is over seven, and look at us. Since when did we ever rise above our own worst natures? I couldn’t even rise over my mild discomfort to visit Terizen. At Dachau, I had studied the photos and read the timelines showing how Germany degenerated into a genocidal state, and I had thought I understood. But what I had failed to comprehend was that a descent into the unthinkable could happen anywhere, at any time—even in America—because this was what humans were capable of. 

Almost to the river now, we passed a bench heavily stained with bird droppings, and I came face to face with a fledgling perched on the back of the seat. It had been able to fly the few feet to relative safety, lifted up on small wings. It was so close I could have reached out and cupped it in my hand. As with any baby, its head was out of proportion to its body; as with a young rook, its beak was out of proportion to its head. It looked exhausted. Even its blue-black eyes were weary. We assessed one another, and whatever it made of me, it showed no fear. I was nothing; I was a speck upon the landscape. Still, I didn’t move, not wanting to startle it back to the ground. It hardly even understood it had wings yet. But it would. It had gotten this far in the struggle for existence; chances were good it might live. One survivor—that I knew of. More, maybe, would follow.