Vedem Underground: The Secret Magazine of Terezin

VEDEM UNDERGROUND:

THE SECRET MAGAZINE OF TEREZIN

AN UNDERGROUND MAGAZINE created inside a Nazi concentration camp by incarcerated teenage boys is the subject of an exhibition opening soon at The Breman Museum.

The resistance publication was titled Vedem, meaning “in the lead” in Czech, and was in direct defiance of Third Reich curtailments on free speech. It included poems, satire, comics, drawings and prose, and managed to last from 1942 to 1944, making it the longest running underground magazine in a Nazi camp to be regularly produced by its prisoners.

The camp was located north of Prague in Terezin,

a garrison town which the Nazis turned into a ghetto. Fifty boys lived in Home #1, which was originally a school turned into sleeping quarters for the camp. Terezin aimed its propaganda at having outsiders believe the occupants were well-treated. It is estimated, however, that 35,000 people died within its walls while 88,000 were transported to death camps elsewhere.

The first 30 issues of Vedem employed the use of a pillaged typewriter until the ribbon dried up. Undeterred, the boys wrote the remaining editions by hand. A single copy was produced covertly each Friday night and circulated among the inmates with a system of hand signals to

Vedem Underground exhibition at the Holocaust Museum Houston. Photograph provided by the Vedem Foundation. Opposite page: Vedem Magazine (Detail). Photograph provided by the Vedem Foundation.

evade the guards. Surreptitious readings were arranged for all participants which “provided a rare forum for personal victory, truth, camaraderie and self-esteem,” according to the Vedem Foundation.

In case they were detected, the boys all assumed nicknames such as “Baked Glasses,” ”Critic with Pink Eye,” “Dynamo,” “Eyes and Ears of the World” and “War Correspondent” so as to conceal their true identities.

Exhibit curator Rina Taraseiskey, also Executive Director of the Foundation, appreciated the fact that the boys were rebels who refused to be victims. “They were also very talented, so I wanted to do whatever I could to get the story out,” she said. “I was blown away by the story and the fact that so few people knew about it. The more I looked into the subject and the boys who created the magazine, the better the story got.”

Taraseiskey, whose grandparents survived the

Holocaust, discovered a book about Vedem while researching the era, and her family history played a part in attracting her to the project.

“My grandfather began a partisan resistance group while a prisoner of the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania during the War, and my grandmother was part of a group that protested against antisemitism after the war by going on a hunger strike.”

The exhibition Vedem Underground: The Secret Magazine of Terezin, opens at The Breman on Sunday, Oct. 14, 2018, and will continue through Sunday, Mar. 10, 2019. It features art, articles, poetry and prose, from the 83 issues of Vedem, which amounted to 800 pages.

To avoid discovery, all those pages were buried four feet underground at Terezin by Sidney Taussig, the only contributor fortunate enough to stay behind while his comrades were sent off to Auschwitz and its gas chambers. The camp’s blacksmith was his

father, who built Taussig a metal box in which to store the papers, along with more than 100 drawings by Vedem’s editor in chief, Petr Ginz. When the camp was liberated shortly afterwards by the Russians, Taussig unearthed the box and brought it with him to Prague, and the original papers are now at the Terezin Ghetto Museum. A high-quality facsimile of the entire magazine is part of the Vedem

Underground exhibit and will be displayed at The Breman inside an artifact case.

“The main challenge was giving a modern spin on a little-known piece of history that would resonate with young adults, especially with the preconceived notions a lot of people have about Holocaust-related history,” Taraseiskey said. “So we ended up deconstructing and reinterpreting Vedem as a modern-day magazine, complete with sections such as Masthead, Mission, Printing Press and Newsroom that are represented on the exhibit panels. It’s a pretty unconventional approach that can be a challenge to explain to prospective museums but it’s been an effective way to tell the story.”

Taraseiskey initially started producing a documentary about the boys which is scheduled for release next year, “but we figured out along the way that we had all this beautiful content that we could

turn into a museum exhibit while we were in the process of making the film,” she said. Her co-creator and partner in the project is writer and producer Danny King, who was particularly affected by the Poetry panel in the exhibit. “It conveys the gravity of the boys’ situation, with Hanus

Hachenburg’s heartbreaking poem,” he said. King was inspired to learn about a group of boys who refused to merely accept their fate and instead fought back the best way they knew how — through words and art.