The inmates were predominantly Czech, Polish, German, Yugoslav, Soviet, towards the end of the war also British POWs, Frenchmen and Jews, predominantly arrested for resistance against Nazism. 2,500 of them died in the Small Fortress due to bad living conditions, illnesses and maltreatment. The others were mostly transferred to Nazi prisons and concentration camps where 8,000 of them died later on. These inmates were Jews from Bohemia and Moravia as well as victims of racial persecution from Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, Slovakia and Hungary. History is not like the turn of the tide which you cannot stop or change.
History is made by people.
And only people are responsible for this cruel experience, those who caused it as well as those who did nothing to prevent it. Czechoslovakia has been among the first to learn this lesson. In 1938, a British politician said that he will not send British soldiers to war just because of Czechoslovakia, wherever that is. Soon, very soon he found that peace is indivisible. Terez n was a cruel episodic failure of European history caused, inter alia, by the selfish foreign policy of those who refused to put an end to violence in the hope that it will cease in front of their door.