Could Terezin house a European Holocaust Centre?

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Few places have such an eerie atmosphere as the little walled garrison town of Terezin, north of Prague. During the Second World War the Nazis turned the entire town into a Jewish ghetto; 155,000 people passed through its gates and of those who survived the grim conditions, the great majority later died in the death camps of the east. Today this dark legacy still hangs over Terezin. If you walk down its empty streets, the ghosts of the past often seem more real than the life of the town in the present day. Finding ways of reviving Terezin in a way that is sensitive to its tragic past is proving a huge problem. David Vaughan has been following the latest proposal put forward by the governor of the North Bohemian region, Jiri Sulc.

This is how Jiri Sulc himself sums up the idea.

"I would like to see a Museum of the European Holocaust, on a similar scale to the museum that already exists in Washington. I think it is shameful that we don't have such a museum in Europe, and I think that Terezin would be an ideal place for it to be sited."

There is already a museum about the ghetto in the town, but it is on a small scale. The exhibition was only set up after the fall of communism, as the old regime did little to encourage people to remember the Jewish Holocaust. Another factor is that after the war, Terezin revived as a garrison town, with the army moving back into the barracks which had housed tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners. In the 1990s the military left, leaving the town almost empty and with no economic base, which, as Mr Sulc points out, further complicates the problem.

"It is not long since the army left the town, and we have to find a new sense for the place. On the one hand we could try to find ways of developing the local economy, but I think it would be wiser to turn to the most important event in the town of the last hundred years - the Holocaust. It would be a shame to destroy the remaining symbols of what happened by trying to encourage industrial or other economic development."

But this plan for a European Holocaust Centre is not the only idea for Terezin to be put forward since the fall of communism. About a year ago the town hall came up with an extremely ambitious plan to turn Terezin into a major academic centre, with branches of various Prague-based universities - it would be a kind of international education centre, with the focus on the Holocaust. The European Union also expressed support for the idea. However it has been estimated that it would cost nearly 8.5 billion crowns, and it soon became clear that the project was unrealistic for financial reasons.

Mr Sulc's proposal is a response to the failure of that project. It is a way of focusing the project more on the Holocaust itself, without dropping the educational element altogether, and at the same time sustaining European Union support.

There is quite a lot of scepticism - not least on the part of those who run the current museum in Terezin - with suggestions that it might be wiser to start from a completely different angle, to look at concrete ideas that can be realized on the ground, rather than venting somewhat vague and very expensive ideas that have only a limited chance of ever getting off the drawing board.