Terezín was a "show camp" touted by the Nazis as a "spa" for the Jews. It was in fact the inadvertent meeting place for an extraordinary community of artists and cultural leaders. It was also a way station to Auschwitz. What Terezín was and wasn't-a home and a prison, a place of art and a place of death-is a complex topic treated with insight and sensitivity in Terezín Diary. The film relates the story of Terezín through interviews with ten survivors who were among the 15,000 children at the camp (the film's writer-producer, Zuzana Justman, was one). Images from the propaganda film, Hitler Gives the Jews a City, in which Terezín inmates were forced to participate, are placed in haunting juxtaposition to voice-over descriptions of the reality of Terezín. The hoax perpetrated on the outside world is further evident in archival footage that is here artistically and delicately treated. The centerpiece of the film is an interview with Helga Kinsky, whose vivid childhood diaries, along with those of her father, describe the paradoxes of this camp in which children saw "a piano concerto on a rooftop one night and a transport to death the next day." Art that was forbidden in Nazi Germany was made at Terezín: "This is the freedom of the death sentence," remarks one survivor. Indeed, the interviewees offer insights into the vast hypocrisy of the Nazi aesthetic; almost casually, they describe the same relationship between art and death that is so studiously examined in the film The Architecture of Doom.