Like many nurses, I have enjoyed various specialties but have never gained competency in others. Nonetheless, I can still envision what it would be like to be a nurse in most other practice roles. What it would feel like to deliver a baby, go on a home visit, or run a mental health group are all things I can fathom. However, two years ago, I encountered an exhibit about nurses that haunts me. The impossibility and horror of their situation is beyond my ability to imagine.
While in the Czech Republic, I found myself at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Terezín, not far from Prague. Having just been to Auschwitz, I was reluctant to add another harrowing experience to our itinerary, but my husband insisted. Theresienstadt was not a typical camp with barbed wire, barracks, and starving inmates—but it was a ghetto and leaving was not an option. It was designed as a showcase for Nazi propaganda which claimed that Jewish families were being “relocated” to a town they could live their lives, practice their religion, and embrace their culture. That there is a “Hidden Synagogue,” which can still be visited, belies that claim. Today, Terezín looks like a charming Czech town; astonishingly still inhabited but eerily quiet and deserted except for visitors. There are attractive pastel houses and a town square. In June 1944, the Nazis used the town and its relocated inhabitants to deceive the Danish and International Red Cross organizations in the now infamous inspection tour. In reality, Theresienstadt was nothing like the idyllic and active town the Nazis strove to portray for the inspectors, with thriving schools, hospitals, sports, and cultural events. Indeed, many had transported to Auschwitz in advance of the tour to aid in the hoax by reducing the appalling overcrowding.
Theresienstadt was in fact for many, many people, a stopping point on the eventual journey to an extermination camp. Usually, 1,000 people per day were transported from Theresienstadt and faced immediate death upon arrival at their destination. It did not take long for the people living in the ghetto to understand exactly what was happening to those who were forced to board the trains.
For those in the camp, life was horrific, crowded, devoid of resources, and full of despair. The Terezín Memorial – Ghetto Museum is enormously informative, and we spent the better part of a day there. There are heartbreaking drawings done by the children, photos of cramped living space, and displays of the attempts to maintain some sort of Jewish life. It was the exhibits about the desperate attempts by nurses and doctors to provide healthcare that impacted me the most. They organized into a delivery system and cared for people with the minimal materials they had, even performing surgery, dental work, and other medical procedures.
What would it have been like to be a nurse there? There were almost no supplies, equipment, medication, or ability to control infection. One’s ability to treat or even comfort must have felt overwhelmingly inadequate. The nurses treated pain without analgesics, infections without antibiotics, and rampant anxiety and despair without any hope for the future. This is not even the worst part. Each day, everyone knew who was going to be transported out of Terezín to almost certain death. How does anyone even begin to care for these people during their last hours of camp life? How does a nurse watch powerlessly as these people say goodbye to family members, try beyond human capacity to cope, and board a train to extermination? My imagination cannot, will not, go there. Yet, these nurses must have done just that.
In the museum, drawings, photos, nursing uniforms, and medical items display the nurses’ work in heartbreaking and harrowing detail. Nurses often care for others enduring so many untimely and devastating life events, but these were entirely unnatural. They were never meant to occur, and the nurses would have had no preparation for their plight or the horror of their roles. I am in awe of their ability to transcend their own despair and continue to provide compassionate nursing care under unspeakable circumstances.
The International Red Cross took over the camp in May 1945. This year is the 77th anniversary of its liberation but the events there are no less shocking today and the memory of my day there will stay with me forever. Theresienstadt’s nurses remain a testament to the commitment of nursing to its purpose and to the strength of the human spirit. It is impossible to have nothing but boundless respect for them.
Katherine Kuren Black, MSN, RN, NPD-BC, is a Clinical Assistant Professor at Rutgers School of Nursing in Newark, New Jersey, USA. She is the president of Sigma’s Gamma Nu Chapter at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, USA.