Episode 11: “THE LAST FOOTBALL MATCH IN THIERESIENSTADT AND A 35 MM FILM”
It was the most peculiar ghetto set up by the Nazis during World War II. Theresienstadt was a “State for artists”. Musicians, actors, directors, authors, who were supposed to continue to create unhindered by the suffering of the war. That’s how Hitler promoted this. In reality it was a death camp, a transit center for Auschwitz.
The final football match of the league was played in Theresienstadt in August 1944, probably on the 22nd of the month. In the ghetto, continuously since 1942, spring and winter championships were held with teams of displaced Jews.
The Nazis commissioned the famous German-Jewish filmmaker Kurt Gerron to make a film depicting the “ideal conditions” in the ghetto, on the occasion of a visit by a Red Cross delegation that summer. Footage from the last match in Theresienstadt is included in the surviving film documentary, the only film shot entirely inside a ghetto, now in the Steven Spielberg archive.
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14 radio-documentaries about the Holocaust. Oral testimonies and narratives, diaries, handwritten notes. The anthropogeography of the Holocaust, through the traces of space and people.
Research-documentation-presentation: Thomas Sideris
Broadcast: Friday 8 December 2023, 13.00-14.00