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1 Pomlčková válka How many points does the Star of David have? Discriminatory labelling with the Star of David affected all Jews from the age of six and upwards. Photo Czech news agency From 1939 onwards the Jews in our country were exposed to persecution, just as in Nazi Germany. The basic means utilised was the application of the doctrine of the Nuremberg Laws, which had already been applied in Germany since 1935, serving to justify racial discrimination and subsequently leding to the initiation of genocide. The goal of the occupiers, together with those protectorate authorities who were collaborating, was, by implementing a plenitude of regulations to gradually legally remove Jews from society, excluding them from the rest of the population and to dispossess them of all their rights. Thereby Jews were excluded from the government, from a number of professions, their presence in public places was restricted and they were forbidden to buy certain types of goods and foods. The most evident discrimination, involving the compulsory wearing of the yellow Jewish star, was introduced in All these measures were directed towards intimidating, isolating, impoverishing and excluding Jews from normal social and economic life. This bullying, rigorously implemented daily, led to the direct route to the extermination camps.

2 The Terezín Vznik České republiky Family Camp When do we commemorate the International Remembrance Day? The gate to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp following its liberation in January Photo Czech news agency In September 1943 two special transports from the ghetto arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, carrying 5,000 Jews from the Czech lands. These, unlike the others that had been arriving, did not undergo selection, nor were their heads shaved and families were not split-up. Men, women and children were all placed in the BIIb section, which later became known as the Familienlager or the Terezín. Although the conditions there were as abysmal as they were in the rest of the camp, the children, for example, were allowed to remain in the common house during the day, where impromptu teaching was conducted. On the night of the 8th to the 9th March 1944, however, in accordance with the original plan, 3,792 of the camp residents who had remained alive were murdered in the gas chambers. A few months later, on the 12th and the 13th of July 1944, the same fate befell an additional 6 or 7 thousand of the Jews from other transports and subsequently the was shut down. According to historians, it is most probable that the creation of the Terezín was prepared as a cynical cover-up in case of a possible visit by the Red Cross. What is certain is that in March and in July 1944 the Nazis committed the largest mass-murder of Czechoslovak citizens. Of the 17,500 prisoners at the only 1,294 survived.

3 Čechy nebo Česko? How many Jews from the Czech lands were transported to the ghetto? A drawing by Marie Fantlová ( ) when she was thirteen years old representing the view of the countryside from the Terezín ghetto depicting a field and the setting sun. Photo The Prague Jewish Museum Terezín was built between 1780 and 1790 as a fortress to guard the northern access routes to the interior of Bohemia. The German occupation authorities first established the Prague Gestapo s Police Prison in the Small Fortress and later an enclosed ghetto in the town itself. From November 1941 onwards, the vast majority of the Jews from the Protectorate were gradually concentrated there. Other transports also arrived from Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark and Slovakia. The total number of prisoners in Terezín reached 155,000, of whom 35,000 died there. In the period of the ghetto 60,000 Jews were squeezed into the town in which 8,000 inhabitants had lived before the war. Terezín became a transit point, usually on the journey to the extermination camps. In the crowded ghetto, living in squalid conditions and in constant fear of the next day, of the few consolations available one was art and another was caring for the children, representing the future. Teaching, concerts, improvised theatre, drawing and writing did not signify mere entertainment, but rather a means of survival and of the preservation of human dignity.

4 Prezident with his wife Adéla and their daughter Jiřina in cca Photo Czech news agency In which town does the action in the novel Bylo nás pět take place? One of the many, who went through the horror of Auschwitz, was ( ), the author of several books, including comic books, Muži v offsidu (Men in Offside) and Bylo nás pět (There Were Five Of Us). In the period of the First Republic he was an editor who wrote reports of court cases, short stories and essays. The German occupation and racial persecution prevented him from publishing and, for that reason, his novel Hostinec u Kamenného stolu (The Stone Table Inn) was published under the name of the painter Vlastimil Rada. worked in the Jewish Community as a librarian until 1943, when he volunteered to join the transport, after his life partner was included in it. In the autumn of 1944 he was transported from to Auschwitz concentration camp, which he left during the evacuation of the prisoners. He died in January 1945, when all trace of him disappeared during a death march between concentration camps in Silesia.

5 Vláda Since when has the title of Righteous Among the Nations been awarded? Photo Czech news agency ( ), a writer and translator, best known worldwide as a close friend of Franz Kafka, with whom she corresponded from 1919, when she began to translate his work into Czech, until their mutual cooperation and correspondence ended in 1923, shortly before Kafka s death. Her own work - essays, articles, personal testimony and other reports about the interwar years in Central Europe did not enjoy their deserved recognition until after the end of the Second World War. After the rest of Bohemia and Moravia had been attached to the Third Reich she was actively involved in the anti-nazi resistance movement and assisted a number of Jewish families to emigrate. In November 1939 she was arrested for her anti-nazi activities and in the following year she was deported for re-edu cation to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died of typhus. In 2004, the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations, designated for people of non-jewish origin who contributed to the rescue of persecuted Jews during the war.

6 Parlament The conflagration of the synagogue in Liberec on the 10th of November Photo The Regional Research Library in Liberec Did the Reich pogrom also occur in the Czech lands? On the night of 9th to 10th November 1938 a state-organised pogrom against Jews took place throughout the whole of Germany, which, based on the shards that were all that remained of hundreds of Jewish shops, is remembered in history as Kristallnacht. Serving as the pretext for this was the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris who was gunned-down by a young Jewish man who had been expelled from Germany. During the pogrom nearly all the synagogues in the Reich were destroyed, usually burned-down, while Jewish shops and businesses were looted. About 7,500 Jewish shops were reported to have been demolished. During the actual pogrom 100 Jews were killed and subsequently about 30,000 were deported to concentration camps. They were not released from the camps until they made a commitment to emigrate and their property had been seized on behalf of the Reich. The Nazis additionally ordered the German Jews to pay a fine of one billion marks, about 10% of the Government Revenues. The November pogrom of 1938 heralded the complete physical extermination of the Jews.

7 The Memorial in the Pinkas Synagogue comprises a list of the Czech and the Moravian Jews who perished under the Nazis. Photo The Prague Jewish Museum What is the term used by Jews to describe the holocaust? The term holocaust is derived from the Greek word holokauston, which represents a designation of a religious offering that is totally burned. It was first used by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel in relation to the systematic mass-murder of Jews in his novel The Night (La Nuit, 1958). In our country, as of the date of the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, there were approximately 120,000 people of Jewish origin. Less than 30,000 of these escaped from the dangers of Nazism by emigrating, while almost all the Jews who remained in the Protectorate (over 81,000 people) were deported to concentration camps or to ghettos. Of these less than 10,000 survived. About 10,000 other Jews preferred suicide to deportation. A total number of around 6 million Jews were murdered in the course of the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its allies during the Second World War.

8 V Evropské unii Where did the largest Jewish revolt against the Nazis take place? The Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto in May Photo Czech news agency The suffering of the Jews between 1938 and 1945, their systematic persecution and their tragic fate, still overshadow the fact that Czechoslovak Jews did not all surrender to fate and instead joined the resistance movements that existed in Bohemia, Moravia and the Slovak Republic. Thousands of them, both men and women, joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile in their hands they fought against Nazism and fascism on all the fronts of the Second World War. They were in action in the East and in the West and they fought in some of the major battles of the Second World War, for example in Tobruk, Sokolovo, Dukla and Dunkerque. According to rough estimates, Jews comprised about 32% of the men in the Czechoslovak Army in exile in Great Britain in 1943, 35% of these were in active service in the Soviet Union in 1942 and even as many as 50% them were active in the Middle East. Domestically Jews were active in partisan groups, including participating in the Slovak National Uprising. resistance also took other forms, however. During the period of the deportation they played a large role both in the ghettos and in the concentration camps by helping others, by saving lives and by slowing-down the Nazi killing machine. In this situation resistance and maintaining their own dignity also happened to be heroism.