Prague used to have a very sizeable Jewish community, but it was decimated by the Holocaust. What remains are a few practicing Jews, and the old Jewish quarter. Many people who go to Prague visit the Jewish quarter (it is right near the other tourist areas and easy to navigate), and we definitely wanted to see it. We went in the afternoon after we visited Prague castle.
There is enough of a Jewish community that there are still kosher restaurants, so we stopped at one for lunch. We were hoping for Matzah ball soup, but sadly it wasn't available until later in the day. It was still good and we had some great hummus and falafel.
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| First clue that it's a kosher restaurant? |
Unfortunately, while we were hoping to go to the Spanish Synagogue, it is closed for renovations. However, there was still a lot to see.
We saw three synagogues. First, we went to the Old-New Synagogue (so named because it was newer than ancient synagogues, but older than the others right around it). It is small, but I believe services are sometimes still held there (it was hard to get that information).
We next went to the Pinchas Synagogue. That one was tough. It is no longer a working temple, but instead serves as a memorial to the approximately 80,000 Czech Jews murdered in the Holocaust. All of their names, along with the date of their execution, are handwritten on the walls. It was extremely powerful.
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| Row after row after row of names |
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| It's really impossible to capture what 80,000 names feels like. To try to extend it to 6,000,000 is mind-boggling. |
We then walked through the old Jewish cemetery. It is probably most famous for how crowded it is. It was the only place in Prague where Jews were allowed to bury people for over 400 years. What is important to know is that Jews are forbidden from moving a body once it is buried, so to compensate for the space issue they just buried people on top of one another, shifting over headstones and, in some cases, burying the headstones entirely. It's actually a very big space, and just filled with row after row after row of grave markers.
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| A tiny portion of it, and the whole is this crowded. |
Our last stop was the Klausova Synagogue, which is really beautiful and has basically been turned into a museum. It was a little weird to see things that feel so normal to me described on little placards on the walls (for example, there was a small display about Shabbat dinner), but I realize that most people visiting have probably never met a practicing Jew.
We really covered a lot of ground that day (we had started by doing the castle in the morning) so we went back to the apartment (up the many stairs) and chilled out for a bit before grabbing Thai food at the place right across the street that had been recommended by our Airbnb host. It tasted just like the thai food we get at home.
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| How convenient, for family portrait purposes. |
The next day we got up and out early, because we had a tour to Terezin booked. Terezin was an old Czech fort that was turned into a concentration camp for Jews and POWs during WWII. It's about an hour outside of the city. Honestly, I was pretty nervous about how sad this day trip was going to be.
The tour wasn't full; it was just us and one other couple from Canada, and our tour guide was very friendly. We really got to see just about everything. Terezin wasn't just a prison, it's really a whole town. A couple thousand people actually still live there, which feels a little weird to me.
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| Occupied town. There's apartments, a couple cafes, a drugstore, etc. |
The main compound that was turned into bunkers to hold Jews.
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| It's now a museum, largely filled with art that was produced by residents of the camp. This is a recreated women's dormitory. Everything except the beds themselves are belonged to Czech Jews sent to the camp. |
The smaller fort that had long been used for a political prison and continued in its role during WWII.
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| "Work Makes You Free" |
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| This cell once held Gavirilo Princip, the guy who shot the guy that started WWI. |
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| The new portion of the bunker. When other camps were being emptied toward the end of the war, the prisoners were sent here. 600 people would sleep in this room (it is the same size on the other side) |
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| Where Jewish prisoners who violated the rules would be executed. Political prisoners were normally executed by firing squad, but they didn't want to waste bullets on Jews. |
The crematorium that was built when it became impractical to bury so many bodies.
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| 4 of these going all day. They could cremate 8 bodies per hour. |
(It's worth noting here that Terezin was _not_ a death camp, so there were no gas chambers. In fact, Terezin was a "model camp" that was used to show the Red Cross that conditions in the camps were just fine. The juxapostion between how the camp was presented to the international community and the reality of the camp was really driven home in a short movie that we watched there. It showed people running around, playing soccer or cards, going to lectures, etc, while listing the transports of thousands of people to Auschwicz with the paltry numbers of survivors).
We also saw the cemetery where thousands of people, or their ashes, were buried. Many died after the war ended of the typhus epidemic that ravaged the camp in April-May of 1945.
After that we returned to Prague. The day was sad, obviously. I learned a few new things and had a bunch of things that I already knew fleshed out. The kids did really well, both emotionally and with the length of the day.
My last post talked about the rest of our day, so I won't repeat. Long and short is that I think it is important that we went. Our guide kept talking about the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions and I kept thinking about what is happening on our southern border. We say "never again," and truly, never again is now. It doesn't take a lot to make people capable of unbelievable cruelty. We need to do better.
