(Beit Theresienstadt, 27 April 2017)

Beit Theresienstadt offers a lesson about what propaganda, betrayal of friends, brainwashing, blaming others and incitement to hatred are able to cause. These are all things we encounter today and every day without feeling imminently threatened from them. But if someone exploits them like the Nazis, they can confuse the heads of millions of educated people and they can cause the death of millions of innocents.

We are at the Museum, which reminds us of the ghetto Theresienstadt. This ghetto was founded by the Nazis during the Second World War, two years after they occupied my country. It was then called Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia was the island of democracy in Central Europe, a liberal country where many Jews and democrats from Germany fled after Hitler made it impossible for them to live at home freely and with dignity. German refugees found new homes and good life there. But not for long.

Sadly, our allies betrayed us in the difficult times. In 1938, they naively tried to save peace. They refused to come to help us in our fight against Hitler and they signed with him the shameful Munich Agreement. With the same agreement the British Prime Minister boasted in front of the cheering crowds in London saying "We agreed on a peace for our time!" His peace lasted only for 11 months, however. Then came the World War II, in which 360,000 citizens of my country perished. Most of these victims were Jews, who at the time accounted for only 2% of our population.

After Nazis occupied my country, they expelled all 6000 original inhabitants of a Czech city Terezín in order to squeeze 50.000 mostly Jewish people into a new model ghetto. Not yet an extermination camp, but still in Theresienstadt people were recognized not by names but by numbers and they were living and dying in terrible conditions. Ms. Ruth Bondy, one of the survivors told me that people from Theresienstadt were overlooked by those who survived Auschwitz: "There were 40.000 Theresienstadt victims which, from the point of iew of a holocaus survivor, might seem as a summer camp in comparison to the death factories in Birkenau or Sobibor where millions were killed." Even though less people died there than in some other camps, Theresienstadt is important as a terrible example of hoax and public lies.

This is because the Nazis tried to persuade the world to believe they treated Jews nicely so they organized two faked propaganda events in Theresienstadt: a visit of Red Cross and a propaganda movie. First they succesfully washed brains of their own people while telling them that Jews are the reason of their poor lives. Then they spread propaganda lies to the world which, we must admit, did not want to see the full picture. They staged everything in Theresienstadt as a Broadway show - happy daily life, smiling people, orchestra performing in the main square. But - the ghetto was terribly overcrowded. What was the solution of the Nazis? Well - they killed most of the people. The city looked better in the movie after that.

In the exhibition, you might see a part of this movie with the final song of the original 1944 performance of children opera Brundibár which was performed by children 55 times in Theresienstadt. Please notice the look of Brundibár. The evil man with moustache is a clear incarnation of Hitler. Let me quote my dear friend, member of the original Brundibár cast Mrs. Hana Poláková-Drori: „We wondered all the time whether Nazis did not understand that what we were singing was against them or whether they just did not care because they knew that we were all going to end in gas chambers“

My lesson learned from this experience is the following: With evil, there is a need to fight, not to be friends with it out of fear to get hurt. False propaganda, lies, half-truthsand manipulation of people can lead to terrible ends. People tend to follow false prophets too easily and they also easily believe what they want to believe. It is therefore important to keep your own reason in every situation and to look for the causes of the problems firstly in ourselves and not in others.