Duration: 5 hours, half day excursion

Half day excursion (5 hours).The town and the late Baroque fortress of Terezin were founded in 1780 by the Austrian Emperor Joseph II, and named after his mother, Maria Theresa. The fortress was protected by a sophisticated network of canals and moats. Despite all these precautions, the fortress was never actually besieged. During World War II, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the German occupation forces, turned the so-called Small Fortress (Mala pevnost) into a prison, and the town of Terezin into a Jewish ghetto. Later, the ghetto became the biggest Nazi concentration camp on the territory of today's Czech Republic. About 60,000 people perished in the camp, most of them Jews. The National Cemetery commemorates their fate.