National Cemetery
For many of the 32,000 people (27,000 men and 5,000 women) who entered the Small Fortress as prisoners, their stay within the prison was temporary and they were soon transferred to a concentration camp, most often to Flossenbürg, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrück. Approximately 8,000 of those transferred died in the camps.
But many also met their death within in the Small Fortress. The malnutrition, hard labor, disease, torture, and executions all created an atmosphere of death.
Through October 1942, the company Bubak was responsible for burying those that had died within the Small Fortress. After October 1942, until February 1945, the dead from the Small Fortress were cremated in the crematorium built for the Theresienstadt Ghetto in the Large Fortress.
The cremations ended in February 1945, at which time, the dead were then buried in mass graves near the execution site.
When the SS guards fled the Small Fortress on May 5, 1945, there was already an epidemic of spotted typhoid fever. Many who had survived the Nazis did not survive the typhoid fever.
At the end of the war, the Czech people created a National Cemetery just outside of the Small Fortress. Bodies were interred within this cemetery beginning in 1945 and continuing until 1958.
In total, 10,000 corpses are buried in this cemetery (including the 601 exhumed from the mass graves), unfortunately only 2,386 in individual graves.
The victims were Jews and non-Jews, of many different nationalities. All had suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
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