Lesser Fortress

Bohemia

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Terezín’s Lesser Fortress, which served as a prison and concentration camp, lies 700m east of the town centre. The best way to see it is to take a self-guided tour through the prison barracks, isolation cells, workshops and morgues, past execution grounds and former mass graves. The Nazis’ mocking slogan, Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes You Free), hangs above the gate to the inner yard. It would be hard to invent a more menacing location.

In front of the fortress is a National Cemetery, established in 1945 for the victims exhumed from the Nazis’ mass graves.

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