The Bohušovice Crematorium at Terezín

In view of the living conditions in the ghetto, the inadequate hygiene, disease and associated frequent death, the Bohušovice basin close to Terezín, where until then many individual and mass graves had been dug, was no longer sufficient. Therefore on 7 September 1942 the Nazis put a camp crematorium into operation on ground south of the town fortifications in the direction of Bohušovice.

Its main function was to cremate victims who had died in the Jewish ghetto. However, soon the corpses of those who died in the Gestapo prison in the Small Fortress were being cremated there, while eventually bodies were also transported there from the nearby Litoměřice concentration camp. According to the preserved records, the bodies of more than 30,000 victims ended up in the crematorium. Cardboard boxes with the ashes of the deceased were placed in a columbarium created in the casemates of the fortress’s ramparts alongside the Bohušovice road. However, most were destroyed by the Nazis in November 1944 as unwelcome evidence of the horrors that had taken place. Today the crematorium building houses a permanent exhibition entitled Mortality and Burial in the Terezín Ghetto.