His memories of playing the game are foggy, but Micha Glass recalls hiding the board and its pieces under his mattress so it would not be discovered. It was an important way for them to maintain a sense of humanity and purpose in a hellish environment, says Shacher. One of the reasons the games were created, Shacher says, is because the children were separated from their parents and the adult prisoners looking after them did what they could to make life more tolerable. "It's strange to understand how can people make games for children in this special place - in the ghetto," says Sima Shacher, a researcher at Beit Theresienstadt, a center dedicated to documenting life in Theresienstadt. Properties in the game were not popular city streets and landmarks, but rather buildings and locations from the ghetto itself - all named after German cities and a grim reflection of the reality faced by the camp's prisoners. An unofficial version of the popular board game Monopoly was born.įashioned from cardboard and drawn by hand, "Ghetto" Monopoly, was created as a distraction for Theresienstadt's thousands of children and used as a tool to teach them about life (and death) in the ghetto. For one prisoner, an artist named Oswal Poeck, this meant designing and drawing a makeshift version a famed board game. Over 35,000 people perished in Theresienstadt while another 84,000 were sent on to be murdered in the Nazi death camps further east.ĭisease, famine, and sub-human conditions aside, the camp's prisoners did everything they could to maintain a semblance of normality.
In 1942, the boys and their mother were sent to the city of Theresienstadt, an area of north-western Czechoslovakia where the Nazis established a ghetto for the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia.Īt ages eight and 10, Micha and Dan became intimately familiar with death. Their father was sent to a forced labor camp, and their mother detained and tortured for six months. Everything changed," Dan recalls.īoth of the boys parents were arrested. And then the war came and a completely different world. The idyllic life of the Glass family was to be shattered a year later with the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. Their mother was a photographer who liked to document the family's life in photos, and their father an electrical engineer who enjoyed taking his boys skiing. They lived with their parents in the Czech city of Brno. In 1938 the two young brothers were happy school children. Jerusalem (CNN) - Micha and Dan Glass are not your ordinary Monopoly players. Two brothers kept the board and later donated it to Israel's Holocaust museumĪre you a Monopoly fan? Share your favorite photos, tributes and stories with CNN iReport.
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