Svatobořice Internment Camp

The structure of the concentration camps also comprised internment camps. One of them included the camp in Svatobořice, originally set up during World War I as a refugee camp. In September 1942, an internment camp was established there for relatives of soldiers who had left to fight in the Czechoslovak foreign troops. They were arrested as part of the so-called Action E (Aktion Emigraten). Jews were also interned there, but they were sent on to the ghetto in Terezín and Auschwitz. In the camp, labour was made compulsory, there were poor sanitary conditions, malnutrition, diseases and mistreatment. Children of people executed in connection with the Heydrichiade were also imprisoned there. The prisoners included important cultural figures, such as the sculptor and medal designer Julius Pelikán, the sculptor Otokar Španiel and the painter and teacher Josef Jaroslav Filipi, who painted life in the camp during his imprisonment. During the camp's existence, about 3,500 prisoners were sent there.

Leo Haas (April 15, 1901 Opava – August 13, 1983 Berlin) was a Czech painter, illustrator, cartoonist and graphic artist. Because of his Jewish origin, he was sent to the Nisko nad Sanem camp, the Terezín ghetto and the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, where he was forced to work in a workshop where British and American banknotes were forged as part of the so-called Action Bernhard. In 1945, he was also sent to Mauthausen and Ebensee concentration camps. In the Terezín ghetto, he drew a series of educational posters for children entitled "Child, you must not do that!", and, after the war, he made several series of lithographs depicting the suffering of concentration camp prisoners.