It would be hard to overpraise this book. Hájková has not only written a new history of the Theresienstadt ghetto but has also invited us to reconsider the history of the Nazi ghettos more generally “beyond the dynamic of the perpetrator-victim binary” (2). She narrates and analyzes life in Theresienstadt as exactly that: life—life in the harshest circumstances and under constant threat of deportation, life that the diverse range of Jewish prisoners from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, Holland, Denmark, Poland, and Hungary tried to live as best they could. She understands Theresienstadt as a society, one of course fundamentally delimited and shaped by the facts of imprisonment and Nazi policy, but in which the prisoners themselves still possessed a degree of agency. She sets out to reinscribe this agency into the history of the ghetto, drawing on the techniques of microhistory and an unparalleled array of primary and secondary sources from some nine languages. Hence the subtitle of her book: an everyday history.

Central to her discussion is the concept of the master narrative. This should not be misunderstood in a monolithic sense: the master narrative of the Czech prisoners was different to that of the Austrian and German prisoners; the Zionists had a different narrative to the communists; younger Jews conceived of their experience differently to older Jews; women to that of men, and so on. There was no single “Jewish” master narrative among the prisoners. But what the various forms of the master narrative had in common was an approach to the present that “enabled inmates to endow their experience with meaning” (66). “Meaning” could derive from constructions of ethnicity and kinship (not necessarily family based), or from a sense of having a significant profession within the ghetto, whether this be as butcher, baker, or doctor. It could be language-based or gender-based, and it could draw on cultural capital. Hájková describes for instance how older Jews, many of them Austrian and German of bourgeois background, tried to make up for their loss of social status—in Theresienstadt, elderly prisoners were at the bottom of the social hierarchy—by recalling the good times and by seeking to act with decorum in line with prewar conceptions of social standing (89). “Meaning” came from a sense of identity, of belonging to a group, and from endeavoring to see something positive in the activities of this group.

What also emerges from Hájková's analysis is that these variations of the master narrative were not only group-dependent but markers of difference. With great subtlety and insight, Hájková explores for instance the shifting relationship between both language and identity and language and power. She does this particularly with relation to German, which in Theresienstadt was used, of course, by Czech Jews to converse with Austrian and German Jews, but which took on—given the predominance of Czechs in the camp and within the camp's Jewish self-administrative bodies—an ethnicized quality, demarcating the Czechs from the (mostly) older German prisoners who were seen as “foreigners” (87). Group identity could sometimes serve not just to produce a sense of belonging but also a sense of superiority. Even belonging to those groups who experienced less hunger than others could lead to loss of solidarity. Hájková describes how the ghetto prisoner self-administration, working of course to find ways to respond to the hunger politics of the Nazis, tended to ration food so that those who were actively working, or children, received more than older people, who for the most part could not work and were at the bottom of the social ladder. Hájková adds a new layer to Giorgio Agamben's concept of homo sacer—a “human stripped of all social markers, barely living, no longer communicating” (114)—by pointing out that, in Theresienstadt, those dying from hunger-related illness could not communicate because their surroundings no longer had any interest in communicating with them. Homo sacer is bare life “from the perspective of ‘normal,’ social individuals, who want to reassure themselves of their normality in exceptional circumstances” (115).

Hájková describes a stratified society, one that differed from prewar society in many ways, with manual labor carrying greater social status than it had before. But at the same time, that ghetto society perpetuated, modified, and to a degree exacerbated prejudices among, for instance, Czech, German, and Austrian Jews. Sexism and gender stereotyping, with some exceptions, remained typical, and homophobia was not uncommon among the prisoners, representing as Hájková states a “certain rupture” of prewar developments, when there had been active Czechoslovak and German movements for the decriminalization of homosexuality (96).

This is not in first instance a book about Theresienstadt's perpetrators, whose commandants were Austrians (Siegfried Seidl, Anton Burger, and Karl Rahm). While Hájková does provide considerable analysis of the various Nazis and Nazi organizations involved in creating and running the ghetto, her focus is largely on the prisoners, and this is what makes her book so important. Her analysis of the ways they sought to make sense of their dreadful incarceration is precise and empathetic, and while she describes behavior—such as the drawing up of transport lists by prisoners—critically, she never judges. In her chapter on cultural life in the camp, Hájková expresses doubt that this constituted “spiritual resistance”; and where it did, it was often resistance against Theresienstadt's ghetto prisoner elites (177). Making sense of life in Theresienstadt, as this brilliant, moving, and exceptionally well-researched monograph makes clear, meant finding strategies for survival, strategies that brought solidarity within groups but also tensions and hierarchies between them. Much of this was imagined retrospectively as resistance, but were such strategies resistance? Hájková has posed new questions, opening up a whole new field of research.