The sky was rarely darker than on a moonless night in Theresienstadt. Of the 140,000 Czech Jews imprisoned in the concentration camp-ghetto in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, a quarter died of disease or starvation. The rest were carted away, murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps in the East. Yet even in Theresienstadt, there was Hanukkah.
In May 1942, the modernist sculptor and architect Arnold Zadikow was rounded up with his family and deported to the prison camp. He was put to work in the Lautsch Workshop, which produced decorative arts for the Nazis. With the help of a young woodcarver, Leopold Hecht, who stole a block of wood from the Germans, they created a Hanukkiah with nine candles and a Star of David. The inscription in Hebrew read, “Who is like you, O Lord, among the celestials?”
