Category:Holocaust Children, Czechia (subject)

Holocaust Children, Czechia (see Holocaust Children Studies)

Overview

The day after September 29, 1938, the day the Munich Accords were signed, the Nazi army invaded the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia – an event that augured the outbreak of the WW2 less than a year later, on September 1st 1939.

A few months after the annexation of the Sudetenland region Germany declared Bohemia and Moravia to be a German “protectorate”. As a first step, all Jews were expelled from Bohemia and Moravia and their belongings were confiscated. By October 1941 some 27 thousand Jews left the Czech lands, becoming refugees throughout the rest of the country. The second phase began on November 24, when 122 trains left the protectorate carrying 73,608 Jews to Theresienstadt and from there to the gas chambers. Some 263,000 Jews of Czechoslovakia were murdered during the war, of them 71,000 from Bohemia and Moravia.

According to historical sources, between 1941-1945 some 140,000 Jews were forcibly sent to Theresienstadt. By the end of the war, only 19,000 of them survived.

After WW2 some 45,000 Jews lived in Czechoslovakia, mainly in Moravia and Bohemia.