Terezin, a nightmare where the music played on

Music, innocence, art - and death.

Ninety two-year-old Czech doctor Felix Kolmer, a survivor of Terezin and Auschwitz, was helped onto the stage.

Standing above a potholed road that, 70 years ago, was used to transport the ashes of inmates, he said: "We lived the nightmare for the rest of our lives. In our dreams we our friends dying in our arms, we see the smoke coming out of the chimneys, the skeletons, the sunken eyes. We are haunted by our tormentors.

"We were appointed to die but, by chance, we survived."

In its grim juxtapositions, the ceremony at Terezin on Tuesday to mark International Holocaust Memorial Day and 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz - a symbolic date set by the UN as end of the Shoah across Europe - reflected the perverse place that the Czech camp holds in Holocaust history.

Of the 144,000 who were interned at Terezin (also known as by its German name, Theresienstadt), around 35,000 died on site. Around 87,000 were deported to be murdered at other camps, including Auschwitz. And yet it was designated by the Nazis as a "model" facility, a sickening propaganda experiment in which cultural life was encouraged in order to convince the outside world that the Jews were not being slaughtered.

Camp inmates clung onto that falsehood for dear life. There were chamber groups and jazz ensembles; stage performances were produced and attended by prisoners. Tickets for some of the performances were even sold in Prague, 60 km away. Well-known artists, musicians, academics and scientists from across Europe all contributed to the camp's cultural life.

"At Terezin, culture was the last fragile thread that connected its inmates to the human condition," said actor Ben Kingsley at the ceremony. But because of that, he said, "Terezin housed a devilish lie" - it allowed its inmates to dream of normality.

Those dreams were visible in the pictures by child inmates. The reproductions of line drawings, colourful paintings and illustrated diaries, attached to strings along a path leading to the site of the ceremony, were a vision of exuberance now painful to see.

"It was a place where everything meant something else. The Nazis told inmates that they were creating a home for Jews in Madagascar. Of course that was not true. Madagascar meant deportation. Terezin meant Auschwitz and Auschwitz meant death. In the Shoah, the meaning of every place resided in the next place," said Mr Kingsley.

The lie that the Nazis kept up about Terezin was sufficiently elaborate for them to invite the Red Cross to inspect the camp in 1944. Commanders prepared a fake coffee shop, a bank, schools and flower gardens for the visit. Using those props, the Nazis created a propaganda film showing prisoners living comfortable, happy lives.

All of those who appeared in the film were shipped to Auschwitz. This, of course, was the true meaning of Terezin.

As Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka told delegates at a memorial conference held jointly by the European Jewish Congress and the European Parliament the day before the commemoration at the camp: "The distance from Auschwitz to Terezin is about 500km. Today it can be covered in a few hours. Seventy years ago, it was the distance between life and death."

The grandparents of Veronqiue Harari-Ajzenberg, director of the Friends of the Crif, the umbrella group for French Jewish organisations, were both taken to Terezin. "The mother of my mother was snatched by French police in 1944 and ended up there. She got sick there and was not alive when the camp was liberated."

Ms Harari-Ajzenberg said that the recent attack in Paris and Nazis' establishment of the camp were connected because on both occasions, Jews were struck by a hatred that appeared to come out of nowhere.

"Yes, there is a connection. Nobody thought that the attack could have happened in France, it was unbelievable. You go to do your Shabbat shopping and you are killed because you are Jewish. Today, like then, people are trying to destroy our civilisation."

The day before the ceremony at Terezin, the question of how the lessons of the Holocaust could be applied to Europe today was debated in a series of panel discussions at Prague Castle.

Responding to widespread concerns about the threats faced by French Jews, and whether there were similarities between the period before the Second World War and today, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy argued that European Jews are now safer because they have a stronger sense of identity. "In the 1930s the Jews were weak and vulnerable and uninformed. They did not know what was coming. They now have strength because they are proud of their Jewishness, as well as because of what they have learnt from the Shoah."

For US historian Timothy Snyder, the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was an opportunity to reinforce historical truth against what he called the "postmodern denial" of the internet age.

"Freedom of expression with a postmodern denial of truth is a very dangerous mixture. On the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, there are historical facts which are true that are worth remembering.

"For example, most Americans think that the US army liberated Auschwitz, which is ridiculous. The Soviet armed forces liberated Auschwitz. They essentially won the Second World War. At the same time, the Holocaust largely happened on the territory of the Soviet Union, most of which it had taken by invading Poland and the Baltic states."