As if it were life

Theresienstadt became the "showpiece" ghetto of the Third Reich so the world would think that the Nazis were treating the Jews humanely. It was controlled by the SS but run by a council of Jewish elders and presented to the Red Cross as an idyllic utopia. In reality it was a holding post for Jews being shipped to Treblinka and Auschwitz. Philipp Manes was a middle-class Berlin merchant who considered himself a German first, and then a Jew. He wrote his firsthand account of his life in Theresienstadt before his deportation to Auschwitz where he and his wife were killed.