The Jewish Museum in Prague

Today we visited the “Jewish Quarter”, the location of one of the oldest synagogues in the world and the Jewish Museum. The Quarter also contains the Pinkas Synogogue. Walking through that synogogue is one of the most difficult things I have done in a very long time.

I admit, the history of the Second World War is my “thing”. Since I was in grade school, I’ve been fascinated (some might say “obsessed” with the European Theater, the Eastern Front, and the history of the Third Reich. I wrote my honors thesis at Michigan on Nazi propaganda before and after the Battle of Stalingrad. I’m used to seeing materials that blame Jews for the war,  materials that urged Germans to hate Jews. I’ve seen the images from Dachau and Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz-Birkenau– women being forced to strip before being shot, bodies being burned by special commando units of Jews who themselves would be gassed soon after, the bodies of children lying in heaps. I hate to say it, but until today, I thought I was almost….immune to the Holocaust. I’d seen too much, knew too much, thought about it too much.

But walking into the Pinkas Synagogue was like a slap in the face. On the walls of the synogoguge are printed the names of the over 80,000 Bohemian and Moravian Jews murdered during the Holocaust– their family name, their birth date, and the year of death. Some names were followed by years that indicated that the person was over eighty years old. But the moment that hit me the hardest was one name followed by “11.2 1940-1944″. A four-year-old, maybe just learning how to read and write, sent to die.

Upstairs, there was a room dedicated to the “Children’s Drawings from Terezin 1942-1944″. Terezin, or Thieresenstadt in German, was to be a “model camp”. The Nazis brought the Red Cross to the camp to show them how well Jews were being treated, and made a propaganda film about the camp, “The Führer Gives a City to the Jews”. But virtually all of the inhabitants were quickly shipped further east to death camps. The drawings were of the camp and daily life. Some were doodles– one had German language lessons (”Eins für alles und alles für eins”- One for all and all for one). The children who drew these pictures were four and five years old, some a little older. Almost all of them died.

It’s almost impossible for me to explain what the Pinkas Synogogue made me feel. I felt…robbed, in a sense. These people could have been parents, grandparents. They could have been artists or architects or academics. But because of a political ideology, they were deemed “unworthy” of life and brutally murdered. I want to know who these people were and who they could have been. But I never will. No one will. And I think that is one of the greatest tragedies of the Holocaust.