In 1944, the Nazis cleaned up the camp, painting buildings and planting flowers, and deporting inmates to reduce overcrowding, in order to fool international Red Cross officials on a visit into believing the Jews were being well cared for.

Paradise Camp features interviews with survivors, who experienced the hunger, filth and terror that the Nazi officials intermittently masked, and displays old photographs and archival film footage, to reconstruct the truth about Theresienstadt.

But the Nazis realized the high stone walls that surrounded the city made it an ideal site in which to resettle Jews from Czechoslovakia and its neighboring Eastern European nations.

In 1941, the Germans established it as a Jewish ghetto, and transported tens of thousands of Jews there, forcing them to do the work to house and feed the large population.

In late 1942, the Germans began to deport Jews from Theresienstadt to extermination camps throughout Eastern Europe, including Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka.

That year they directed a Jewish prisoner filmmaker to produce a propaganda film portraying life at Theresienstadt concentration camp as comfortable and enjoyable.

Another woman recalls that before the Red Cross inspection, the Nazis built children's rooms painted in bright colors and lined with small beds.