By Cailin Acosta
SAN DIEGO – Jennifer Coburn told a Tifereth Israel Synagogue audience Thursday, June 5, she long has been fascinated with Nazis and concentration camps. She is the author of The Girls of the Glimmer Factory.
Coburn mentioned that years of research went into writing the historical novel. The names and friendships are fictional, but the underlying historical facts are real.
To get a sense of the novel, Coburn visited Theresienstadt, the tiny Czech village 60 kilometers north of Prague. Nazis presented Theresienstadt (Terezin in Czech) as a “model ghetto” which was used for propaganda films and Red Cross inspections.
Two months before the Nazis codified the “Final Solution,” they began transporting Czech Jews to Theresienstadt, promising them it was a “paradise settlement” and “Hitler’s gift to the Jews.”
Many prisoners were world-renowned artists, musicians, and intellectuals, so more than 5,000 pieces of visual art were created – everything from children’s drawings to paintings by some of Europe’s most gifted artists. Over 1,000 musical works were performed at Theresienstadt dealing with a variety of topics.
Theresienstadt was a ghetto where prisoners provided slave labor for the German war effort. They survived starvation rations and lived in squalor. The ghetto also served as a way station to death camps in the east, primarily Auschwitz.
During Coburn’s stay in the Czech town, she asked if she could stay a night in the bed of a prisoner at Theresienstadt but that was denied since the camp is a historical museum. She stayed at a hotel which used to be a coffee shop. She later stayed at the tour guide’s house.
In a time when antisemitism and Holocaust denial are rampant around the world, Coburn wants to be abundantly clear that Theresienstadt should never be regarded as not that bad. It was hell. The existence of beauty and art was a result of two things: the cynical needs of the Nazis and the sheer fortitude of the prisoners.
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Cailin Acosta is the assistant editor of the San Diego Jewish World.