A former military fortress that became the antechamber to Auschwitz during the Second World War, a mock “model ghetto” immortalized in a Nazi propaganda film, Terezín, 60 km from Prague, is today a paradoxical place to live, a city where every home was once a prison.
By recalling the stories of those who were imprisoned there, and by collecting the testimonies of former deportees and current residents, Hélène Gaudy explores the town’s ambiguous relationship with image and lies. Evoking with great subtlety the landscape and the sensations that emanate from it, but also the historical strata and human experiences through which it is traversed, she questions a space caught between an impossible memory and the never-quite-extinguished hope of rebirth.