Monday became Tuesday surprisingly quickly. Fortunately Tuesday was a relatively relaxing day, with two more movies, Closely Watched Trains, about a small town Czech railway station during World War II and a young man, who is having something difficulty with the ladies, and ends up killing himself with a bomb as an act of Anti-Nazi resistance, and Pandora’s Box, about young women who is utterly dependent on those around her, who kills her husband, and is then killed by Jack the Ripper. (yes, death is an important part of Central European Cinema.)
Wednesday and Thursday were more of the same, get up, go to class, come home, and eat. It was not until Thursday night that something really interesting happened. That night, AIFS provided us with tickets to go so another Czech Philharmonic Concert. This time they were playing pieces by among others, Dvorak. Now, the concert hall of the Czech Philharmonic is called Dvorak Hall, so as you might guess, Dvorak was in fact a Czech. So, seeing a Dvorak Concert should have been something like seeing Beethoven in Vienna or Mozart in Salzburg. Well, it probably would have been, if I had enough musical talent to recognize Dvorak when I heard him, instead of depending on a program, which I didn’t have. Nevertheless, the concert was nice, and they played the music very well indeed.
The day, Friday, was a day of rest and relaxation. It was also one of Zee’s Prague walks, to the Jewish quarter of Prague. If I didn’t mention this before, Zee is basically the Czech Republic’s answer to Dr. Whittenburg, he knows everything about everything in Czech history, from the battle of Austerlitz to the fall of Communism, so he’s Prague Walk’s are supposed to be pretty interesting. Even though it was snowing, I didn’t have anything else to do, so I decided to check out this particular Prague Walk.
We started at the Main Building of Charles University, which is located right next to the Jewish Quarter. The Jewish Quarter was based on the original Prague Ghetto, where for centuries the Czech required the Jewish inhabitants of the city to live. At one point there at least 20,000 Jews living in the quarter, but as a result of the Holocaust, that population has been reduced to only 5000 or so. The Jewish Quarter is home to six synagogues, the Jewish Town Hall, and the Old Jewish cemetery.
Our first stop on the walking tour was one of the synagogues, the Maisel Synagogue, which was built by an important Jewish family to serve as their private synagogue. Today, the Masiel synagogue is no longer used as a synagogue, but rather as a part of the Jewish Museum of Prague, to recount the history of the Jews in Central Europe. It explains how in the 10th century the Jews came to live in Prague, how they were subject to discriminatory laws by the Kings of Bohemia, and later the Austrian Emperors, laws which restricted them to one part of town, required them to register to be married, and to wear clothing which identified them as Jewish.(If this sounds familiar, its because the Nazis borrowed most of these for the Nuremberg Laws, you’re going to wish I didn’t say this, but more on that later.)
Our next stop on the tour of the Jewish Quarter was the Old Jewish Cemetery. Even in death, the Jews were not permitted to leave the ghetto. They were instead buried in a single cemetery located near the Maisel Synagogue, and the Pinkas Synagogue(more on that later). The cemetery is little more than two or three acres of land, which for centuries was home to Jewish burials in Prague. As a result, in some areas of the cemetery, people are literally buried on top of each other, in one case thirteen caskets deep. To mark these spots, the grave stones themselves are clustered very close together.
From the Jewish Cemetary, we headed to Pinkas Synagogue. Pinkas is another synagogue which is no longer in use. It has been given over instead as a memorial to the Czech Jews killed in the Holocaust. As a part of this memorial, the names of the dead, where they were deported from, and how old they were are written on the walls of the synagogue. It is not a small synagogue, and the names cover every wall in the place…some 78,000 in total.
From Pinkas, we headed to the Jewish Ceremonial Hall. Originally set aside to be used in certain religious ceremonies, today, the ceremonial hall is a museum that was originally constructed by the Nazis. They had determined to create a museum of the “extinct exotic race”, and as a result shipped Jewish artifacts from all over Europe to Prague.
After looking at these artifacts we headed to the oldest synagogue in Prague, the Old-New synagogue. Like the other Synagogues we’d seen on our walking tour, Old-New is no longer in general use, though on special occasions it is still used. It is among the oldest Synagogues in Europe, having been constructed in the 13th century. It many buildings constructed in that period, the synagogue is based on Gothic designs, with high vaulted ceilings and columns. The build is supposedly home to the Golem, a robot constructed out of clay and the name of god by a thirteenth century rabbi, buried in the Old Cemetery, to defend the Jews against the Christians.
The last stop of our walking tour was another Synagogue, the only active synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of Prague. This synagogue is also built like a gothic church, indeed, like the one in Budapest; it looks like a cathedral decorated differently. We weren’t able to stay that long inside, as services were about to start.
That night was fairly relaxing, we went out to a bar, and got a couple of drinks and played some chess(I lost to Adrian after about 20 moves). We headed back fairly earlier though, as some of us had to get up at a reasonable hour for the trip to Lidice and Terezin.
First, though, a little background. In March of 1939, German troops invaded the Czechoslovkia, less than six months after Hitler had agreed to the Munich accord giving the Sudetenland to Germany. The Germans easily occupied Prague, and the rest of the country, and set up Slovakia is an independent puppet state. The Czech lands, Bohemia and Moravia were ruled as a province of Germany. From about 1940, they were ruled by a man that might be the very definition of evil in human form, Reinhardt Heydrich. Heydrich was the right hand man of Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestpo and the SS, and was one the chief architects of the Holocaust, chairing the Wannsee Conference were it was decided to exterminate the Jews. In the Czech Lands, he had mission to remove every Slavic citizen and replace them with Germans.
Heydrich’s rule would last until May of 1942, when several Czechoslovak paratroopers ambushed his car on the outskirts of Prague, and killed him.
Hitler was furious that Heydrich was dead, and order an investigation. The investigation linked the small town of Lidice, located just north of Prague, to the paratroopers. On night of June 10, 1942, SS forces surrounded the town. On June 11, they moved in, rounded up every male citizen of the city, and shot them in the town square. All of the women and children were deported to concentration camps, and most did not survive the war. The town itself was dynamited.
Today, a town has been rebuilt near the former site of Lidice, however, the old site of the town remains inhabited. Place near it, is a small museum and a memorial to the victims that includes a statue of the Children of Lidice looking the direction of the place where their fathers were murdered. Walking around the area, especially on a winter day, it is eerily quiet, with almost no sound except for the blowing of the wind.
(Modern Lidice)
From Lidice, we head north to Terezin. Terezin is a fortress city originally constructed to defend Austria-Hungary and Bohemia from Prussian invasion. It consists of a small fortress, and a larger fortified town. During the period of Austrian government, the Small Fortress was used as prison. Among those imprisoned in Terezin was Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who died there in 1916. When the Germans began to set up the Concentration Camp system, they turned the fortress of Terezin into a Concentration Camp.
Unlike most camps however, Terezin was not an extermination camp, though that did not mean that conditions there were terrible, and conditions in the Small Fortress were even worse. Terezin was instead a transportation camp, where deported Jews would live for a time before being deported to Auschwitz or some other extermination camp. Even at Terezin however, thousands of Jews, including most the Czech Jews to die in Holocaust perished either in Terezin, or on their way out of it. Despite this, inside Terezin, the Jews maintained some semblance of life. They went on educating their children, performing plays and musical works in an attempt to keep the horrors of what was going on around them at bay. The museum at Terezin includes a reconstruction of the Concentration Camp barracks, with all their harsh conditions and lack of any sort of personal space, examples of the works of art and music which were produced in the Concentration Camp, an a video based on Nazi propaganda about the camp.
If Terezin itself was brutal, the Small Fortress, was as close to Auschwitz without the gas chambers as you can get. The Small Fortress was home to Jews who had violated some law or other of the Nazis, and Russian Prisoners of war. Like Auschwitz, the Small Fortress has its “Work will Make You Free”, sign, which is never a good sign.
The Russians prisoners were kept in conditions that were similar to life in other concentration camps, no living space, little food, no access to showers and beatings. If anything, conditions for the Jewish prisoners were even worse. The cells in which they were kept were barely bigger then my kitchen, and they were packed in several to a cell, they were not given access to running water, the medical care was poor, despite the best efforts of the Jewish doctors, and life was short. Almost 2000 people perished in the small fortress, many from beatings and shootings, though certainly the most chilling image from our visit were the still standing gallows. The gallows were the last thing we saw at Terezin, before we started t o head back to the van. As we past a small stream however, we noticed a small family of otters, or some water born mammal living in the stream, that made us all smile.
Next: Prague Part VII: On the Opera and Jeden Svet.
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